My own experience of online stalking and abuse is well documented with the archive of this blog, so I won't really go into too much detail about it as it has stopped now. My 'attacker' is blocked from my Facebook account, and as I have deleted my Myspace site I never go there anymore. Myspace is where the bulk of this happened, which gives an idea of the timing. As far as I know, he doesn't use Twitter, although I don't doubt that he still reads my blog and Twitter feed as he always did before.
A young girl called Hannah Smith recently committed suicide as a result of online bullying from the website ask.fm, something I had previously never heard of. As it is aimed at teenagers, then it isn't really my thing to read through loads of acronyms and coded language; it pisses me off when people my age can't spell or tell the difference between there, their, and they're so a group of kids will just give me a headache. Having read some of the disgusting things that Hannah Smith had to read, you have to wonder what people are thinking to have to aim this hatred at someone. Women on Twitter are dealing with the same shit; threats of rape and violence and bombs outside their house, and I can only wonder how distressing this can be.
My way of dealing with online abuse was to fight back and simply be as patronising as possible. When I used to allow comments on this blog, I would begin comment replies with "anonymous comments hold no relevance", and then correct their spelling and grammatical errors. In fact, correcting the spelling mistakes of this attacker would have turned into a full time job if I let it, so I simply don't allow comments. Abuse I can deal with, illiterate morons I cannot. Although my attacker doesn't tweet, (to my knowledge), I once fell victim to the most hilarious bout of online abuse when I insulted Mick Hucknall. They eventually tired themselves out when I kept retweeting their best comments, as tagging me in to them was just childish attention seeking. This would be my advice, take the piss out of them because you are better than them. I am certainly better than my attacker as I had the nerve to confront him and invite him to meet up for a fight. Since that day, I haven't heard a word!
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