Now, have you ever followed Piper Perabo (@PiperPerabo) on Twitter? Actually, what I should ask is, have you followed her at any point in the past year? Because if so, you probably subsequently received one or more spam tweets that look like this:
That is because there is a lunatic troll out there who has been harassing Piper and her followers on Twitter non-stop for a full year now, as of this writing - July 2014. He has created probably upwards of a thousand troll/spam accounts at this point, and set up bots to send these spam tweets to every person who follows Piper. These days it has gotten so bad that if you follow her right now, you'll probably get spammed from several of this troll's accounts with the same message. In my 5+ years on Twitter, this is the only situation I've ever seen like this. Trolls and dickheads come and go, but I've never seen someone continuously harass one person for this long, this relentlessly.
The majority of people out there are smart enough to know that they're being scammed, and they ignore him (or tell him to eff off). But there are also a decent chunk of people who are naive enough to believe this random internet troll, and they actually unfollow or block Piper. Case in point:
Using common sense on the internet proves to be too much for many people, unfortunately.
Here is the background I've been able to gather on the troll:
1. I think he lives in Italy or somewhere in that vicinity. This is because before he completely lost his marbles, I noticed him begging Piper to have dinner with him while the Covert Affairs cast was filming in Rome a year+ ago. Needless to say, she didn't respond. He made it crystal clear what a creep he was even then.
2. After many fruitless attempts on his part to get a response from her, he finally gave up and sent a bunch of tweets like this, from what I believe was his original account:
3. He then spent a month or more just sending her super nasty misogynistic stuff of the "suck my dick" variety, from various new troll accounts. Classic harassment. Each time she'd block/report him, and he'd get suspended, he'd create a new account to find new ways to tell her to suck his dick.
4. After a while, he realized that he was just going to keep getting suspended too quickly if he tagged her directly, so he stopped. That's when he moved to what he does now, which is spamming her followers with a message that she's "hacked" and sends out viruses. He got this idea when Piper actually did get hacked once a year+ ago, but she fixed the issue literally within an hour or two. It's happened to all of us at one point or another on one of our accounts - Facebook, email, etc. You just change your password and it's fixed. No big. But this troll used this as a catalyst to spend the next year (and counting) of his life spamming every follower of Piper Perabo telling them to unfollow her, with the threat of an imaginary virus. Which, btw, you have to have absolutely zero knowledge of how Twitter or viruses work to believe that you're going to get a virus from following Piper Perabo on Twitter. Say that out loud and think about how laughably ridiculous it sounds. Maybe if we can propel this sitch into urban legend status along with Richard Gere and his alleged gerbil, people will realize it's fake.
Anyway. It was at this point that a group of us banded together to start reporting this S.O.B. at every opportunity we could find. Twitter has never been very responsive to the reports, but for a while there, we were able to keep TrollBoy down to maybe 4 to 7 active spam accounts at a time, with Twitter Support going through about once every week or two and shutting them all down (at which point he'd immediately get busy on creating new ones). It was an incredibly frustrating situation, but at the very least, we felt like we were somewhat keeping him from growing into a complete monster.
That is, until recently. Sometime around May, I believe, we started receiving this response to our reports, from Twitter Support:
So, essentially all functionality to file an abuse report has been shut down unless you are the direct victim of the harassment. It seems like a reasonable policy to prevent false reports, but we have quickly realized that they're not really enforcing this even if you ARE the direct recipient of the troll tweets. You see, it's super easy to get TrollBoy to spam you directly: Just follow Piper from any account you have. Voila, TrollBoy spam. Then report him as someone who has been directly spammed by him. We've done that from several different accounts, and guess what? Still nothing.
We've tried both of the basic options: Report for Spam, and Report for Abuse. Neither of these functions seems to do anything or go anywhere anymore. Report for Spam, I'm starting to think, has been turned into a total placebo button that secretly does nothing at all. Report for Abuse gets you an automated response that your case will be "reviewed shortly." Guess what? It's been 21 days since I opened my first case and I've gotten zero response. The account is still active. Every account we've reported is still active.
TrollBoy now has free rein of Twitter. Almost none of his accounts are ever suspended anymore. One of them got suspended a couple days ago after actively spamming for a full month, and we rejoiced, only to see it RE-activated the next day. With ALL the 1,000-ish spam tweets still there. They didn't even make him delete the spam! It's confounding. I know for a fact that a decent number of his spam victims are reporting him, and yet nothing is happening. He trolls right on with zero resistance.
You want to see how bad it is? Here's a short list of his troll accounts that are still currently active as I type this (and these are just the ones I know about, who knows how many others there are):
"Meredith": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2433169110
"Mike Crewsone": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2440640258
"jonah lomu": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2476611858
"Lea Franks": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2476677212
"Sally Wagner": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2485073107
"Victoria Brown": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2539189554
"Manuel Silber": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2527446685
"Vincent Sisse": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2539510369
"Giselle Fernandez": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2561161130
"Heather Jefferson": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2569275248
"Evra Jacquin": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2566036891
"Sara W.": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2564825132
"Cristina Mendez": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2555006084
"Dorea Brown": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2573831510
"Marissa Wiltorde": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2580820412
"AltidoreTXGis": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2582480713
"Emily Welber": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2602327188
"Jenevra Melson": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2600464651
"Amanda Felix": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2598314251
"Brooke Gisell": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2598198068
"John Bravo": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2581993766
"Jesse Edmilson": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2590210920
"Sheril Rodriguez": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2573206824
"Genevra Walles": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2591591688
"Sarah Cester": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2591531342
"Corea monchele": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2519413514
"Samantha Wilson": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2586956023
"Marge Benson": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2586507542
"Margaret Wagner": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2586460550
"Jenna Mendez": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2580762163
"Roger Ferguson": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2603137844
"Jonathan ferret": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2603253253
"Dana Wilson": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2603205475
Remember before when I said we were able to keep TrollBoy down to 4-7 accounts at a time? Yeah. Not only is he now able to run free with as many accounts as he wants, but now he actually tags Piper directly in almost all the tweets. And there are now zero repercussions. The evidence of Twitter's severe downshift (complete stoppage??) in spam and abuse policy enforcement is crystal clear. And it's goddamn infuriating to watch someone get away with this horrendous behavior - classic internet harassment - completely unfettered, day in and day out. Twitter, what is your strategy here? I just ... do not ... get it. I sincerely hope that by the time people read this post that the above accounts will have been suspended, but I'm sure as hell not going to hold my breath.
For what it's worth, Piper herself is incredibly sweet and extremely grateful for the help we've given, and she follows the Twitter account which was created to communicate all TrollBoy's accounts on a regular basis so that we can all report them. Even my husband has gotten in on this, big time, because we both work in high tech and it's been an extremely interesting problem to try to solve. It started off as a engaging challenge for us, but at this point, it seems that Twitter has just given up and rolled over. They've laid out the red carpet for the trolls and spammers and abusers and harassers. So what are we to do? No one who has any power over this issue seems to give a shit.
So hey, abusers and trolls and harassers of the internet, or at least of Twitter, you win. Congrats. Have at it. Twitter welcomes you with open arms.
UPDATE 9/2/2014: Wow. I just got confirmation that my above statement was even more true than I had hoped when I originally typed it. Piper Perabo has confirmed that she herself has actually talked to Twitter about this, and they still have not made any noticeable effort to resolve the issue. I just ... no words.
Education and public shaming are our only options left at this point, which is a huge part of why I wrote this blog post a couple months ago. Again I ask - Twitter, what is your strategy here? Just, nothing? Is this it?
UPDATE 6/22/2015: Here's another update, lest anyone think to themselves, "Well it's been almost a whole year since this post, the issue has to have been resolved by now, right?" Wrong. Nothing has changed in the past year. Nothing at all. Twitter has made some tweaks in the way it lets you report harassment, but those tweaks have yet to result in any noticeable change or improvement whatsoever, especially in our case. It has now been 2 full years, and TrollBoy is still going strong.
In November 2014, we participated in this study, which allowed us to get a good chunk of TrollBoy's accounts suspended. I do see several old ones (from the list above) that are still active though. Anyway, the study resulted in some interesting data, but so far, nothing more than that. The second the support from WAM ended, Twitter's support of our issue stopped as well. It was then back to square one, which is ZERO support whatsoever. Which is: Twitter ignoring the shit out of us, hardcore. Here are a bunch of the accounts TrollBoy has been using in the past couple months, that are still active as I type this:
"Edgard": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2782721557
"Sarah Vittek": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2988188260
"Jack Emerrton": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=3033488429
"Jillian Stromberg": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2995542111
"Maika Reddy": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=3029007705
"Pancrazio Gawin": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=2984340077
"Dana Sanchez": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=3061690024
"Alyssa Rodriguez": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=3081442067
"Brad Dunham": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=3093542836
"Marisa Wilson": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=3123313385
"Mike Rosenberg": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=3227773635
"Erman Klose": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=3208685950
"Edgard Vittek": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=3229965232
"Mike Frenner": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=3229902629
"Samantha Wilson": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=3239589525
"Helen Olsen": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=3253276923
"Erika Roz": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=3282361859
"Jenna Silverstone": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=3294387417
"Ellen Slen": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=3291115067
"Samantha Elson": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=3301607656
"Mika Wilson": https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=3329064999
TrollBoy has gone through more than just these accounts in the past several months, but in going through my list again, the absolute only thing I can say for Twitter is that they seem to have suspended most of his accounts that are more than about 5-ish months old. But unfortunately, suspending accounts 5+ months after the fact is of zero use to us whatsoever. If you're not stopping him from the accounts he's using now, right away, then you're not even coming close to resolving the problem. It should also be noted that these days he doesn't create new accounts as fast as he used to, because he doesn't have to. Twitter lets his accounts remain active for so long that there is no need for him to create new accounts.
Twitter has been very public about making efforts in recent months to improve their support system for abuse and harassment, but I have yet to see anything that even makes a tiny dent in stopping a troll with the lunacy and dedication of TrollBoy. And I know there are plenty of others like him. Twitter, we're still waiting. 2 years now. Still waiting.
UPDATE 8/7/2015:
I have more updates on this, but I think I'm going to create a new post for it, because this one is getting so long. Click here for the updates.
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