Abusing people is rife on the internet and no amount of police action seems to be inhibiting the behaviour. Stylist asks, are we entering the new age of nasty?

Words: Helen Lewis

"Slut of Twitter.” That’s what Frank Zimmerman called Louise Mensch in an email in August last year. The 60-year-old agoraphobic also said one of her children would be killed if she refused to leave the social networking site. Mensch – then still an MP and one with a very high profile – called in the police and Zimmerman was hauled before the courts this summer and given a 26-week suspended sentence (for the charge of sending by public communication network an offensive, indecent, obscene, menacing message or matter), and made the subject of a restraining order preventing him from contacting various well-known figures, including Mensch and The Apprentice’s Lord Sugar.

And there we have it. A vile introduction to the world of trolling. But he was just one man, just one ‘internet troll’. Unfortunately, cases like Mensch’s have been cropping up with increasing regularity in the media. Other celebrity victims include TV chef Lorraine Pascale (in November she was called “an ugly unevolved animal” by a particularly enlightened tweeter from America), Olympian weightlifter Zoe Smith was called a “lesbian” and “bloke” while she represented Team GB this summer, and Cheryl Cole has spoken of “vile” bullies who labelled her “fat”. The internet is no longer just an information highway – sadly it has also become, without intention, an ungovernable network of cruelty.

While trolling didn’t start out being this abusive, it’s not a new phenomenon. The word was originally an angling term meaning “to draw a baited line through the water”. Early trolls did something similar: as anonymous users, they posted deliberately provocative, or inflammatory statements on bulletin boards and forums, in order to derail conversations and wind up their peers. It was little more than (childish) games. A Guardian comment thread asking trolls to out themselves uncovered dozens of these stories; one man confessed to logging on to a forum for teenage Christians, where he convinced a poster to “offer up penance for watching Herbie: Fully Loaded because I claimed that a car with a mind of its own was blasphemous”. Another classic trolling technique is to pose a seemingly naive question, drawing in ‘newbies’ to answer it patiently, and then pretend not to understand their increasingly exasperated explanations.

These days, that type of trolling looks almost innocent, in light of more serious cases of abuse and harassment. Trolling is now the catch-all term for attacking people on the web; assaults which veer between threatening female writers with rape to logging on to Facebook tributes pretending to be the murdered children those very pages commemorate.

Beware of the troll