Friday, August 21, 2009

Troll toll

On America Magazine's blog, Michael Sean Winter's talks about the experience of getting a "creepy" text message, prompted by something he had written. Meanwhile, model Liskula Cohen has gotten a court order to determine the identity of the blogger who created an entire blog to malign her. Trolls - anonymous, incendiary and rarely polite - are everywhere it seems. Trolls can be annoying, disturbing, and on occasion, threatening. Right wing blogger Hal Turner has been charged in connection with threats on the lives of federal judges.

A troll message of the disturbing sort -- sent to the email address I use for my columns in the Catholic Standard and Times-- appeared in my inbox a week ago. It suggested I would be interested in browsing material that was nothing but bigoted vitriol. What bothers me most? That anything I've ever written would even suggest that I would think this way? or that anyone could assume that to be Roman Catholics would be to believe this nonsense?


Post script: The Ethicist at the NY Times has an interesting post on his blog about this issue.

2 comments:

  1. Ouch! Sorry to hear that you have been targeted like this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. tis a strange world, even more reason to avoid the computer while on retreat.

    ReplyDelete