[mquander]

"Almost certainly" seems like a stretch.

- The arguments regarding Traynor's behavior on Twitter carry absolutely no water with me and sound like totally average behavior. It's not very intuitive that only people you follow can message you.

- Police in America frequently decline to investigate things like harassment and petty theft in favor of spending their time elsewhere. I don't know about Ireland, but it seems very unsurprising (if disappointing) that they would ignore his complaint.

The only compelling reason to disbelieve anything is the whole home address discovery thing, which does seem very strange. Although it's possible that there was some convenient coincidence that permitted the identification, probably that part of the story was embellished or false somehow. (edit: After looking at replies, I changed my mind, I think it's more likely mostly true. There's a lot of plausible avenues of discovery given the length of the alleged abuse.)

The rest, however, seems very conventional and I don't see a good reason to disbelieve it.

[btilly]

It's not very intuitive that only people you follow can message you.

But after you've received some hate messages, it also sounds like the kind of thing that you'd learn pretty quickly.

In other words if you're making up a story, it is the kind of detail that you'd not noticed you'd gotten wrong. But if you're actually harassed, it is the kind of thing that wouldn't keep happening to you for years.

Seems like a good reason to conclude that the story is made up.

As for home address discovery, that bothered me far less. If I had tracked someone down to 3 IPs, one of which was close, I'd go looking for evidence that there was a personal connection. One of the standard things that I would think of is to look through all received emails, and look for the IP address there.

That would indeed track it down reasonably reliably to a specific household without any need for a court order. And if the person that I did this for didn't understand what I did, confused explanations about how it was done are only to be expected.

[gojomo]

It looks to me like Traynor understood that the follow-backs enabled the DMs, but resisted changing his behavior (at first) to not let the troll win. If the follow-backs sometimes led to nice exchanges with new friends, it's reasonable to hope the troll would tire, or that handling via unfollow/Twitter-reporting would be enough, before going full "shields up".

The way Traynor describes it, after he eventually went fully private on Twitter, the harassment moved to other forums.

[woodchuck64]

> But after you've received some hate messages, it also sounds like the kind of thing that you'd learn pretty quickly.

He can't know in advance if he has a troll following him, and he likes to reciprocate followers. Should he, in a sense, penalize followers because of a troll?

I don't see anything in the original story about the delay between July 2009 and making his twitter account private. Is there anything to think it was years rather than weeks?

[ryguytilidie]

This makes no sense at all to me. If you're getting 2-3 people a day following you, and then sending you hateful DMs when you follow back, you seriously keep refollowing random people who will presumably be harassing you? It's not punishing anyone to put a bit of an effort in to seeing if the person seems legit before following them back.

[woodchuck64]

If you have 20 new people a day following you and 2-3 are trolls, I'd still do it. No troll is going to make me change my polite behavior with other people.

[wccrawford]

I'd even go so far as to say that if you don't care enough about the person to research them before following them, then you shouldn't be following them anyhow.

[andreasvc]

One plausible scenario for the IP address is that he had comments from his friend on his blog, and then baited the troll to also comment there. The IP addresses would then be identical, providing the identification. Dynamic IP addresses would pose a problem, but most broadband has (semi-)fixed addresses, and even dynamic addresses would come from the same range so could be enough to trigger a hunch.

Rather than embellished, I'd more easily suspect the story of being selective. I just can't imagine someone not expressing anger when confronted with someone who harassed you.

[gojomo]

With the active help of his "IT genius" friend, the deduction of a neighbor's address isn't very far-fetched.

Often the IP will clearly identify a regionally-specific ISP and even a particular community. And once recognized as someone local, there were probably just a few suspects from vague hunches about who seems a little angry/fidgety/pranky.

Maybe the neighbor leaves their wifi open: borrow access one day, see what the public IP is.

Maybe the neighbor corresponds via email with Traynor or the 'genius': check email 'received-from' headers; include an HTML email image bug; tempt the target to click a unique link.

[Zuider]

In reference to your second point, racially motivated crime is taken very seriously in Ireland.

Traynor was apparently subjected to sustained and horrific racial abuse based on his being Jewish. There has been an escalation of attacks on Jews in Europe by Islamists and neo-Nazi groups. This, combined with death threats and the fact that the abuser knew where Traynor lived would very definitely attract the full attention of the law.

There is either a problem with the police here, or with the story.

[wamatt]

>"Almost certainly" seems like a stretch.

That's an big issue with our society.

Unless you have huge following (eg PG), making moderate considered and balanced headlines and opinions, more often than not fails to get a reaction and hence traction, even if it's more truthful.

[ghshephard]

" It's not very intuitive that only people you follow can message you."

I am a very, very sporadic user of twitter - I've tweeted maybe 40 or 50 times, and one of the very few things I know about it, is "You can't DM somebody who isn't following you"

Nothing to do with intuition - the client gives you a big fat message saying so the first time you try and do it.

My understanding from the article is that this Traynor was a twitter veteran - and I'm guessing somewhere on the order of 99% of frequent twitter users, and DMers know this.