Article 1AAFX Is it too late to stop the trolls trampling over our entire political discourse? | Owen Jones

Is it too late to stop the trolls trampling over our entire political discourse? | Owen Jones

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Owen Jones
from on (#1AAFX)
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Free speech online can be revolutionary. But it can also poison the very bloodstream of democracy

It was a pretty standard far-right account: anonymous (check); misappropriating St George (check); dripping with venom towards "Muslim-loving" lefties (check). But this one had a twist. They had found my address and had taken screen shots of where I lived from Google's Street View function. "Here's his bedroom," they wrote, with an arrow pointing at the window; "here's the door he comes out at the morning", with an arrow pointing at the entrance to my block of flats. In the time it took Twitter to shut down the account, they had already tweeted many other far-right accounts with the details.

Related: The dark side of Guardian comments

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