Hunting the Internet Bullies Panorama

including racist abuse. Social networking sites have changed the

way we talk to one another. But what happens when you're the one

being talked about and you don't like what's being said? There's

been many times where I've cried myself to sleep. I'm very scared

and I've never, ever said that. I like to think that people think I'm

strong. Tonight on Panorama, hunting the internet bullies. Who

they target... You guys have ruined my life. Why they do it. Loads of

people are doing it. It's purely to get some kind of reaction to people.

And what happens when we confront them. Facebook is an open forum.

You're entitled to your own opinion. Some of the it racist. People have

been convicted for doing less than In 2010, Cher Lloyd went from being

anonymous teenager to pop star. She reached the final four of the X

Factor. It was a dream come true. After her very first appearance on

the show, she noticed something remarkable happening on her

Facebook profile. Within minutes my Facebook page exceeded the amount

of friends you could have. It was excitement for me. I just kept

clicking "confirm" because I couldn't believe how many people

wanted to be my friend. Since the X Factor she's sold over 400,000

singles. But there was a price to pay - nasty, sometimes racist

comments posted about her online. Her mother is of Roma origin. That

was used to attack her and it continues to this day. I must get

at least ten tweets a day saying that I'm a dirty pikey, yeah. I

must get that. Why do they say that? Erm, I think because they

know it's going to get to me or because they know they can. There

has even been a death threat to a member of her family. There's been

many times where I've cried myself to sleep. I'm very scared and I

have never, ever said that because I like to think that people think

I'm strong. Because if they don't, they might not think I can do it.

But I am in some ways, but I think some days I just wish that people

would leave me alone for a little bit, wish for there to be a hole to

suck me in. You've been really affected by this, haven't you?

never thought that I could talk to anyone about it, because I didn't

feel like I needed to. I thought that I'd be strong enough to get

through it on my own. I think that's the worst thing you can

possibly do. In the last five years, social networks have become a fact

of life. Facebook now has 30 million users in the UK. That's

almost half the population of the country. But for some, the runaway

success of social networking has come at a cost. Natasha McBryde was

15 when last year, she was bullied not on Facebook but on a smaller

social networking site. Tash came home from school one day, floods of

tears and saying that she never wanted to go back to school again.

It was quite serious. It wasn't just a fall out with friends that

she'd had and I believe that her mother did look into possibly

transferring schools etc. So it shows the seriousness of the nature.

What began as a disagreement in school soon went online. Panorama

understands at the height of the problem there were 30 pages of

critical comments about Natasha on one social network. Her father

believes it contributed to what happened next. It was a perfectly

normal evening. There had been discussions at tea. There had been

a bit of a fall out with one of her friends and then at 9.30pm, she

just walked out. Something had happened that she just decided

enough's enough and yeah, she walked out of the house. Early the

next morning, Shanie Erwin an officer with the British Transport

Police was called to the scene of an incident on the railway line.

About 2.30am on February 14th, a train driver discovered the body of

a young female on the railway line, just further down here. It was just

up here, yeah? Yes, just on the bridge here in front of us.

first thing I knew about it was about 6.30am and suddenly, I got a

phone call from my son James there had been an incident on the railway

and the lines were closed and that we needed to go down to the local

bridge. Natasha had committed suicide by throwing herself in

front of a train. Earlier that evening, she had read nasty

comments about herself online. Cases like this are still very rare,

but cyberbullying is becoming more and more common. Earlier today, the

charity Beatbullying released a major report which says that 28% of

11 to 16-year-olds have experienced bullying or harassment online.

research shows that cyberbullying, online bullying is relatively

common. A large number of children receive abusive, vicious messages,

have comments posted about them online, have hate pages set up

about them online and for some, this happens relentlessly over

months and months. Social networking means that bullying has

become more intrucive. Where once it might have ended at the school

gate, now it can happen around-the- clock. And when it comes to social

networks, one site is now the daddy of them all. What social network

site is the big one, where does it all happen? Facebook. Facebook.

Facebook. For the vast majority of teenagers, Facebook is now just a

part of life. But this isn't just any group of teenagers. They all

work in their spare time for the charity Beatbullying. They're

what's known as cybermentors. They give advice to young people who are

being bullied online. What kind of things do you experience or have

you seen on a day-to-day basis? I've seen many people get told

they're not allowed to come to school, no-one loves you, your mum

don't love you, you look like you've got a disease. So many

horrible things. The cybermentors said they would like to take some

of the issues they had up with Facebook but didn't know who to

call. We recorded some of their questions and asked Facebook if

they would answer them. Their director of policy, Richard Allen

agreed. I tried to report a cyberbully and found out it was

hard to do. My friends struggle with it as well. We feel the report

button does not work. What are you going to do? Is there someone to

speak to at Facebook if an incident of bullying happening. What happens

when you press the report button, where does it go? The report goes

into a system where it's categorised according to the

seriousness of the offence. We've tried to improve the reporting tool

to make it as accurate as possible in terms of categorising reports.

Are you saying it's just too difficult, Facebook just isn't up

to the job of answering phone calls? You're a multibillion dollar

company growing every year. Companies that operate on the scale

we do across the internet, it's incumbent on us to make sure we

have systems in place to allow us to be safe and secure. The only way

to do that realistically and maintain services that are free to

the user, which is their expectation, is to put in place a

large number of automated systems, backed up by trained staff to look

at the most serious cases, which is what we do. To some of the experts

in this area, that's not enough. All of us need to demand more from

social networking sites and hold them to account to make sure that A,

their sites are as safe as they can possibly be and B, that they

actually work more and support organisations that deal with the

consequences of what happens on their sites. Facebook does at least

try to promote a real name policy. It urges users to post under their

genuine identities. But on some smaller social networking sites, it

seems the attraction lies in the fact you can post comments

anonymously. At Reigate College in Surrey one site created havoc in

the school. You all know from come together college that we won't have

any student here who has been made to feel uncomfortable or unwelcome

because of someone else making their life difficult. The website

is called Little Gossip. You may not have heard of it, but they have.

Can you put your hand up if you've been on Little Gossip, I mean just

looked at it? Pretty much everybody. Can you now put your hand up if

you've been named on it, if someone has commented about you? So quite a

few. It works by allowing people to leave anonymous comments about

anyone they like. That's bad enough, but it's all organised around

schools and colleges, which makes it even easier for the people

around you every day to see what's being written about you. No wonder

this site has been called a recipe for cyberbullying. A quick look at

the site for Reigate College reveals a list of horrendous

comments about real named individuals. Like this one for

When it comes to nasty design features, Little Gossip seems to be

the site that has thought of everything. One feature mean that's

your peers can vote on whether a piece of gossip about you is true

or false. When you're giving them is your e-mail address. This man

has re-- recently retired as head of Reigate. If there's a comment

about you, it's a comment that says you're unpleasant, nobody wants you

around, 38 people have said "true" and no-one's said "false", it make

it's so much worse. It will build up the opinion that you're not

wanted in that community. We wanted to find out more about Little

Gossip. First, was to find the person who invented it and he

agreed to talk to us. Ted Nash is now a 20-year-old app

designer. Little Gossip was all his idea. But these days he has nothing

to do with it. He originally set it up from his bedroom as a chat forum

for his friends. What was the thinking behind it? I mean, how

many people did you expect would be involved with it? There's no way I

expected it to be as big as it was. It had 33,000 hits within the first

hour. Ted Nash did set up controls so that people could report abusive

comments and bullying. The trouble was once the traffic took off, how

can one man cope with 60,000 pieces of gossip which come in. It got to

a stage where I deleted everything coming through because it was too

fast. I took the domain offline. Through those four days I was

approached by a number of people who said, you know, can we take the

site off you? Within days, Ted sold the site on. It was difficult to

find any information on who owns Little Gossip now.

Until very recently, it was hosted by a company called lease lease

based in the Netherlands. Leaseweb says it recently stopped hosting

the site and said it couldn't tell us who owned it. We did discover

that it was recently registered with a Russian internet service by

an anonymous person, who gave a contact number in Belarus, a

Communist-style dictatorship in Eastern Europe.

This is the problem with regulating sites like Little Gossip, the sites

users are in one country. It's hosted in another country. It's run

from yet another country. The owners of the site don't have to

tell anybody who they are or where they are. How on earth, do you

regulate that? Anonymity is a big problem when it comes to

cyberbullying. Getting offensive comments from people you know is

one thing, but getting them anonymously is anotherment This --

another. This is Formspring. You can ask questions and others answer

them. Can can use their real name or anonymously. Natasha McBryde was

bullied on Formspring. It was being abused by a lot of people in that

they were sending anonymous postings to Tash with some quite

vindictive and nasty things being said about her, which obviously

undermined her confidence and made her naturally very upset. Because

the comments were all anonymous Natasha didn't know who in the

school she could trust and who she couldn't. Because she didn't know

who it was and probable thri was one of her friends, she didn't know

who to turn to. There was a bad apple amongst her friends, but she

didn't know which one. Formspring is integrated with Facebook, so

that it's easy for users to connect from one site to the other. Why is

it that Facebook, which has a real name policy intergrates and link

was a site like Formspring, which revels in anonymity? We are

responsible for the content on our service. If a third party starts

abusing or breaking the terms and conditions for the use of Facebook,

then we'll make sure that they're not able to access our service. But

we're not responsible for what they do within their own environment.

But why Lincar to them? Why integrate to them? -- why link to

them? Why integrate with them? people on Facebook can link to most

of the internet. We can't a rule where you can't link to the

internet. We asked Formspring for an interview. They declined. They

For Natasha MacBryde's father, the crucial point is that anonymity on

the internet can be dangerous. think the first thing is to remove

the anonymity of people on social network sites because an awful lot

of bullying is done because people can say it, because they think they

will not be caught and therefore that's why they say what they like.

And do you think anonymity played a big part in what happened to

Natasha? Absolutely. Anonymity - for many people, it just gives them

a chance to let off steam online. But for one internet subculture,

being anonymous is a way of life. They are internet trolls. There's

Trolls set out to provoke a reaction, often by upsetting and

offending people as much as they can. You guys are bitches you know

what, you don't phase me. Jessica Leinhardt, an 11-year-old girl from

Florida, became one of the most- well known trolling victims of

recent years. Her story shows what can happen when you inflame the

global community of internet trolls. I'm more pretty than you, I have

more friends. It all started when Jessi went online to post a video

of herself, using her online name, Jessi Slaughter. I'm happy with my

life, OK. If you can't, like, realise that and stop hating, you

know, I'll pop a Glock in your mouth and make a brain slushy, OK.

This video also went viral. Internet trolls thought that 11-

year old Jessi needed a comeuppance. So they went to work. Malcolm

Blackman saw what happened up close. Today, he's part of the activist

group Anonymous UK, but when the Jessi Slaughter campaign was at its

height, he was in close contact with the people who were attacking

I spent quite a lot of time with several notorious world trolls

online. I spent some time in their company. Obviously not in their

personal company but online. I gained a modicum of respect from

them for what I do. And they in turn over the time, I ran with

their pack gained my respect. hating on me. So what happened to

Jessi? Well, Jessi became the target of pretty much a worldwide

viral hate campaign. It wasn't just the trolls. I mean, it became a

vehicle for anyone to jump on to to really slaughter Jessi Slaughter.

And if you hate me. The trolls got what they wanted. Jessi posted

another video a few days later, this time in great distress.

Remember, she's 11 years old. this is Jessi Slaughter I just need

to tell you guys that you have ruined my life. My house has been

torn. I don't be suicide. I am not. Jessi's father intervened as well.

You guys have ruined my life. going to tell you right now. This

is from her father. You bunch of lying no-good punks. But this video

didn't stop the campaign, it just made it worse. By now, trolls were

invading every aspect of Jessi's life hijacking her social

networking sites, publishing her real address online, and even

sending constant pizza deliveries to her house. I am torn. I have had

emotional breakdowns one after the other. I guess the point is that

the internet community is merciless in a sense. It is, yeah. It doesn't

take account of age. It's just there are people there who are

going to... Well, because they can literally get away with being...

It's a great term, merciless it is, they can be thoroughly ruthless.

Malcolm says he's out to work against trolls, but he admits he

associates with them regularly, and he can even see why they do what

they do. It's the thrill, it's the win, being able to claim a victory,

being able to infuriate someone to the point where they log off or

they disconnect their computer. To a troll, that is a win. For many,

the worst kind of trolling happens on tribute sites to those who have

died. It's surprisingly common - there's even a name for it RIP

trolling. Just hours after her death, Natasha MacBryde's family

were coming to terms with the idea that cyber-bullying may have played

a part in her decision to commit suicide. But nothing could have

prepared them for what happened next. Pretty much immediately after

Tash had died, a tribute site was set up on Facebook. I had a phone

call from a friend saying had I seen it because there was a

particularly nasty comments being put up. What had been posted on

Natasha's tribute website was a range of offensive and obscene

remarks. Someone had even made an animated video of trains, using a

picture of Natasha. How soon after her death were you reading this?

That was within about 24 hours. you are in the initial traumatic

stages of grief. I was still in a state of shock at the time when we

are seeing this traumatic stuff being posted about your daughter.

Some disgusting and disgraceful. When most people have seen in the

media, horrendous comments to actually see about your daughter.

Shanie Erwin of the British Transport Police was investigating

the death of Natasha when told of the Facebook posts. I had never

heard of the term trolling before so we worked with Facebook and

YouTube and later with the internet service providers and enquiries -

both those and others led us to Sean Duffy, a 25-year-old loner who

suffers from Asperger's syndrome, was responsible for many of the

posts. Panorama has obtained exclusive footage of his police

Apology for the loss of subtitles for 52 seconds

In the interview, Duffy gives a Duffy was charged under the

Malicious Communications Act. It's a piece of legislation that

predates the internet, but it's still one of the best tools the

police have for prosecuting trolls. He was convicted and sentenced to

18 weeks in prison. He served nine weeks. Most trolls are never caught,

but we decided to try and track one down. We met a source who's

familiar with the trolling community, and he gave us

information about one notorious troll. The screen name of that

troll is Nimrod Severn. On this pen drive is the evidence of what this

troll Nimrod Severn has been up to. And really he's just popping up on

loads of RIP tribute sites and leaving really offensive messages.

But some of them are extremely On Boxing Day last year, Lancaster

University student Anuj Bidve was murdered here. A memorial page was

posted up for him on Facebook and within days Nimrod Severn posted an

offensive comment. "Rot in kiss". But on the tribute site of US

rapper Dolla, who was shot dead, he used one of the most racist terms

We wanted to meet the person behind Nimrod Severn. And it turns out we

were able to put a face to a name. His real name is Darren Burton. It

We have managed to track down Darren Burton, we've got an address

for him. He lives here, in Cardiff. We're going to go and try to find

him today and ask him the big question which is why? How can he

Hi, Declan Lawn, BBC Panorama. Can I ask you about the internet

trolling you do? What do I suggest? Go away. But you are Nimrod Severn,

can I ask you about it? Can I ask you how you justify it and why you

do it? What I want to ask you, Darren, is have you ever thought

about the people that you are hurting? Have you ever considered

that? Have you ever considered it? Do you think about the effect it

has on them? That's my question. Yeah. And what do I think? Yeah,

what do you think? I think (BLEEP) 'em. That's what I think. Darren,

how do you justify it? Justify what? The trolling. The trolling.

How do you justify it? How do you justify the trolling? It's

extremely offensive and hurtful for people. Is it breaking the law?

Well, some of it is racist, so some of it is and some of it is clearly

an incitement for racial hatred. You are entitled to your own

opinion. Facebook is an open forum. Facebook is an open forum and

you're entitled to your own opinion. Some of it is racist. If people

don't like it then fair enough. There's things on there I don't

like and I don't kick off, though. People have been convicted. People

have been convicted for doing less than you've done. Like what? Nine

weeks? People have been convicted. Nine weeks in jail? Yeah. What's

that? So there you go, an internet troll. That's what they look like.

The big question here is that the law seems unevenly applied. Sean

Duffy wrote on Natasha MacBryde's RIP site and was convicted for it.

Darren here does pretty much the Darren Burton told us before we

went to see him that South Wales Police had already visited him

about his trolling, but says they never took it further. So we asked

South Wales Police about it. They acknowledged they had visited

Darren Burton back in November 2010 to give him what they called

suitable advice about his future activities on the internet and that

at that time there was no evidence that a crime had been committed.

But clearly it didn't stop Darren I think there is also a variation

in how the law is enforced in different cases and the level of

knowledge between police officers and between police forces, in terms

of how to deal with cyber-bullying, varies greatly. There's just no

joined-up approach to dealing with it, is there? There's no joined up

approach. Perhaps what they need is some training. And some

understanding and some confidence of how to deal with cyber-bullying.

What actual protection the law, or the different laws, that are

involved in this affords to the victim and what as a police officer

you can do. Cher Lloyd told us she feels there's no point complaining

to the police about the people who are making her life a misery and

that there's not much she can do about it. Let's say you had become

well known ten years ago, before social networks. Do you think you'd

be happier about what you were doing? Yeah. I think that... I

think I would be a lot happier. I'd be protected a lot more. A few

comments to a young girl that's all When it comes to the social

networking revolution, all of us are trying to keep up with a

changing world. Most of us have no problems online, but some do. And

when they do, they're not always Next week on Panorama: