[Evbn]

0. He didn't change his behavior during the abuse, when he could have trivially stopped it by unfollowing. If your car was stolen, would you keep the loaner unlocked before your car was even recovered?

1. Only if they use non webmail

2. To sell a story. The default assumption should always be that tales like this are false or at least extremely embellished.

[samspot]

Wait... am I supposed to assume all blog posts are false? Certainly an interesting way to live. I'll start with your comment.

[bduerst]

If there is one coincidence to make you question the authenticity of the author - nah.

If there are several coincidences, then this leads to a pattern of behavior to which a motive can be questioned.

[gojomo]

Traynor did change his behavior: but when he unfollowed one account, another took its place. It took him a while to change his habit of an optimistic follow-back -- if some of his follow-backs resulted in pleasant exchanges with new friends, why wouldn't he try to outlast the troll for a while? -- but it's clear he eventually did.

And Traynor reports that when he made his Twitter account private, the harassment moved to other forums: Facebook, blog comments, email.

[ryguytilidie]

This line of logic works to a point, but if 2-3 strangers are following you per day on twitter and then when you follow them back, they send you hateful messages, wouldn't you consider at least getting to know the person/changing your behavior? I get that you wouldn't think its a big deal if it just happened a few times, but the guy is screaming that it was happening 2-3 times a day and we are wondering how he possibly could have seen this coming. Seems pretty simple to me.

[gojomo]

He did change his behavior! He unfollowed/reported harassers and eventually rejected all new followers by taking his accounts private. And then the harassment came via other avenues!

What more are you expecting him to have done? And why wasn't it OK for him to try remaining open to possibly-friendly strangers for as long as possible? And he's not "screaming" or indeed complaining about anything, he's just describing a chain of events.

He's condensed around 3 years of on-and-off-again harassment and on-and-off-again countermeasures into a few paragraphs. You can either read it charitably, and assume other consistent and reasonable details for things unsaid, or read it in a hostile and suspicious manner (as '@ResistRadio' has).

[steevdave]

I'm not taking any side, by my own personal habit for a follow on twitter is to look at who followed me's stream before following back. I'd hope others would do the same rather than automatically following back.

[wonderzombie]

You talk like these were the only 2 to 3 strangers that ever followed him, that only trolls followed him. Was that the case? How are you to distinguish between legitimate followers and not?

The whole OP reads like a string of conjectures just like this one. I kept waiting for some firsthand knowledge of the matter, some smoking gun, but mostly it was a lot of innuendo and assumption.

There's just not a lot of "there" there. It sounds more like an assemblage of facts to fit a theory rather than the other way around.

[ryguytilidie]

My point is simply that if you're going through a period where 2-3 people are harassing you in the exact same manner, every day, you might consider changing your behavior to stop it from happening. I know I would.

[andreasvc]

Ad 1: webmail can show IP as well; e.g., hotmail has X-Originating-IP header. It makes a lot of sense to include such information for obvious abuse tracking purposes.