A Dublin-based Twitter user who was repeatedly harassed on the social media platform to the point where he feared for the safety of his family has said he hopes his experience will encourage a public debate around the issue of cyber-bullying and the impact of social media on teenagers.
Leo Traynor, who tracked down and eventually shook the hand of his online tormentor, wrote an account of his experience in his blog. This has attracted widespread online coverage since it was published on Monday.
The blog, which had attracted up to 200 hits per month, received more than 200,000 hits in less than eight hours yesterday.
In his blog, Traynor’s Eye, he described a three-year period during which he was subjected to a litany of threatening and violently abusive Twitter messages, forcing him to suspend his use of the platform. A Twitter user since 2007, Mr Traynor, who has Jewish ancestry, started to receive abusive messages, many of which were anti-Semitic, in July 2009.
He blocked the offending account and reported it to Twitter.
He received more abuse from a different account a week later however. This became an “almost daily cycle of blocking and reporting and intense verbal abuse”, he wrote in his blog.
He changed his security settings and had no more problems until his Facebook account was hacked. His blog was then attacked and his email flooded with graphic images of corpses, concentration camps and dismembered bodies. The abuser then started to target his wife. The situation escalated when he received a parcel at his home address containing a tupperware box full of ashes and a note bearing the message: “Say hello to your relatives from Auschwitz.”
Two days later, he received a direct message from the abuser saying, “You’ll get home some day ur b**ches throat will be cut ur son will be gone.” Mr Traynor reported this to the gardaí but “polite and sympathetic as they were, there didnt seem much that could be done”.
He was advised that he could legally track down and identify the abuser. With the help of a friend, he traced the IP addresses used by the abuser. Two of the addresses pointed to public wifi spots, the third location to a friend’s house.
In his blog, which triggered a debate on Twitter and Reddit yesterday, Mr Traynor wrote that he addressed the issue with his friend and established that it was his 17-year-old son who was behind the abuse. Mr Traynor met the boy and his parents by arrangement. He confronted him, showing him photographs of the images he had been sent and describing to him the sleepless nights and the impact the abuse had on his family.
The boy burst into tears and apologised to Mr Traynor, saying “it was a game thing”. Mr Traynor did not call the gardaí as he did not want to criminalise the boy. Instead, Mr Traynor insisted he see a counsellor. “Then we shook on it,” he wrote.
