Will the police prosecute this Twitter troller?

The case of Liam Stacey, this week jailed for for posting racist and abusive messages on Twitter, has highlighted the subject of internet “trolling”.


I came across another one of these trollers yesterday, equally vile but who seems to have slipped under the radar of the law - keep reading.

Stacey, a 21-year-old university student, launched a tirade of abuse onto the net after footballer Fabrice Muamba was taken critically ill during a match.

Minutes after the young black player collapsed he had “LOL”-ed about him being dead, before releasing a torrent of racial abuse at outraged Twitter users who challenged him.

Admitting he was drunk was no excuse, and he paid the price for putting his mouth, or more to the point   fingers, into gear without thinking.

His comments seemed to be a bizarre reaction to the misfortune of someone who fell into a category he clearly has contempt for, in this case having a different racial background.

But there is  a breed of internet users who seek out other people, often celebrities, and high-profile users, to deliberately hound them with abusive comments.

They hijack chat rooms and forums spouting personal insults seemingly for the pleasure of it.

They have become known as “trolls”, their actions “trolling” - I imagine due to their hiding in the dark corners of the world wide web and jumping out to attack random passers by.

Coincidentally, I came across one of these menaces this week.

I was due to meet Natalie Cassidy on Thursday so went onto Twitter to message her before the interview.

While looking up her account I found that a similar account holder, Team Natalie, had retaliated to someone who had posted something insulting.

It said: “I'm no longer going to respond to lowlifes like you. And for your information, we're not Nat.”

Team Natalie is in fact not Natalie’s own account but I imagine that of fans who post updates about her, what she’s up to, next appearances, that sort of thing.

Looking at the thread of messages I discovered there were indeed abusive messages posted to Natalie and the culprit was a user calling himself @megamicrophone1 or “Midnite_Intruder”.

I clicked on his profile and read his Twitter feed. True enough it was one long diatribe of abuse aimed mainly at celebrities.

Highly insulting and personal attacks on Natalie Cassidy, Katie Price and her family, and other high-profile users.

He appears to target celebrities at random calling them c***, p*ki,and other insulting terms and making lewd references to their sex lives.

They are all abusive, racist and homophobic, i.e. similar to those posted by Stacey.

The one difference is this isn’t a one off drunken outburst, but a systematic and sustained campaign of abuse against other Twitter users.

The fact I stumbled across his page on the same day Stacey was sent to prison for posting abusive Tweets was a coincidence.

I decided to contact him to ask what his motivation was, and what satisfaction he gained from trolling.

I tweeted him saying I was a journalist researching a story about the practice and asked to know why he bombarded celebrities with racist abuse.

Now my experience of doing this job has always taught me to gather and document my evidence before confronting my subject.

A phone call from the press can often result in things disappearing, water pipes left gushing for months miraculously getting fixed or in this case twitter accounts mysteriously disappearing.

Given that I contacted him the day after someone was send down for doing the very same thing, I thought there was a good chance he may be a little nervous and might want to over his tracks in case the police or twitter decide to investigate him.

After all bullies are in essence cowards and at the first hint they’ve been caught they usually run and hide. 

So I scrolled down his list of tweets and photographed a select few (below).

I have blurred out some of the details for decency.

I went back to his account today, and when I clicked on it, would you believe, I was given the message “This user does not exist” - he, or she,  had deleted the account.

And without responding to my query. Still, I was never under the impression manners were at the top of the agenda for Midnite_Intruder.

If he was hoping to slip under the metaphorical troll’s bridge he was mistaken, and I can see no reason why Twitter or the police would not go after him.

Once again, if they need his details, the account name is Midnite_Intruder and his profile name @megamicrophone1