Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

"Almost certainly" seems like a stretch.<p>- The arguments regarding Traynor's behavior on Twitter carry absolutely no water with me and sound like totally average behavior. It's not very intuitive that only people you follow can message you.<p>- Police in America frequently decline to investigate things like harassment and petty theft in favor of spending their time elsewhere. I don't know about Ireland, but it seems very unsurprising (if disappointing) that they would ignore his complaint.<p>The only compelling reason to disbelieve anything is the whole home address discovery thing, which does seem very strange. Although it's possible that there was some convenient coincidence that permitted the identification, probably that part of the story was embellished or false somehow. (edit: After looking at replies, I changed my mind, I think it's more likely mostly true. There's a lot of plausible avenues of discovery given the length of the alleged abuse.)<p>The rest, however, seems very conventional and I don't see a good reason to disbelieve it.

The author of this article is almost certainly trolling.<p>It's perfectly logical that the victim would change his Twitter behavior even after discovering the identity of the harasser. If your car were stolen but then recovered and the thief arrested, would you stop locking it? After all, the threat has been eliminated...<p>Just because you cannot traceroute an IP to a physical address doesn't mean you can't determine where an IP is being used with a high degree of confidence. If the parents were indeed friends of the victim, any email correspondence sent from their home connection would include their IP in the headers.<p>The biggest flaw however is that there is no plausible motive given for the victim to lie. Sure, it's possible that he lied, but why would he?

This article is copied in its entirety from:<p><a href="http://www.resistradio.com/news/questioning-the-trollocaust-did-leotraynor-really-suffer-vile-hate-campaign" rel="nofollow">http://www.resistradio.com/news/questioning-the-trollocaust-...</a><p>as admitted in the intro. Why link to a copy instead of the original?

The only strong case here is in the IP address geo-identification.<p>Traynor could identify them if he were to cross validate the IP address location with a list of known friends and family - people of whom would have Traynor's personal address.<p>But Traynor should have suspected his friend - not his friend's teenage son. That's the part of the story that doesn't add up.

Just to add a bit more fuel to the fire, while a reasonable skepticism should always be well, reasonable, I think it takes a lot of chutzpah to so directly out and out call this fake given the sparsity of the argument as it is.<p>Compare this to skepticism over ElevatorGate.<p>FWIW, here's a woman at skepchick expressing doubt that Leo even exists: <a href="http://skepchick.org/2012/10/leo-traynor-anti-semitism-and-the-sticky-problem-of-facts/" rel="nofollow">http://skepchick.org/2012/10/leo-traynor-anti-semitism-and-t...</a>

Thank you for posting this. I thought the story was fishy too. Hopefully everyone reading this knows you can't generally trace an IP to an exact home address without help from the ISP.<p>People are WAY too eager to explain that away with "oh he must have cross checked it with his registry of friends IP addresses." Nope. As the article notes, Traynor said the method his "IT friend" used was "almost identical" to ipttackeronline.com, which does not provide exact addresses.<p>Great point about the police procedure for handling credible death threats, too. We don't even have to get into the twitter stuff.<p>Why would he lie? For attention and sympathy, of course. People do it all the time.

This is more of an aside than a comment specific to the article.<p>Over the past year I've felt that the term "troll" is increasingly being confused with what would have been called "griefing" back in my gaming days. My early encounters with trolling were that it was your fairly basic ribbing of friends, nothing particularly malicious. Nowadays, anything and everything seems to be labelled as trolling when I feel that the circumstances with malicious intent would be better labelled as griefing. Not only do I think griefing is a more apt description for the behaviour being associated with trolling, I think it allows for a distinction between harmless fun and out-to-cause-harm when describing activity on the internet.<p>Proper distinction between the two modes would, imo, help keep frames of reference and hopefully prevent knee-jerk reactions to what is currently labelled as trolling affecting a more wide variety of interactions.<p>Also, it would probably help a lot when the next newbie asks you what "trolling" means as well.

If someone was sending me DMs that would mean I had followed them.<p>If I somehow had three IP addresses to general locations, I would wonder who I had followed in those general locations.<p>If in one of those locations a friend of mine lived, I might wonder and then check my email to see what IP addresses had been captured there.

Strange logic or comprehension problem. How did the author go from "does not work in all cases" to does not work at all? Is he really ready to stake his reputation on the claim that an IP address can NEVER lead to an individual's home address?<p>"(NOTE: this does not work in all cases but even a general location is a piece in the puzzle when tracking a troll.) The late addition of this note to ‘Tracking a troll’ only confirms what has just been explained in this article – that an IP address does not enable you to identify an individual’s home address. An author whose article was specifically referenced by Traynor as ’proof’ of his home address claim, has had to admit that the method given in his article does not actually allow you to identify someone’s home address"

Jesus, how much time went into "investigating" this? This is really, really long.<p>We all enjoyed the story, and it sounded plausible enough. It had character depth. It had (kind of) redemption, and forgiveness. It had a boy in an awkward position that we could <i>tut tut</i> at.<p>Who gives a shit if it's embellished?

When Twitter first started many people auto-followed back anyone who followed them. There were apps to make this easy; I never did, but it was pretty common and was how conversations would take place. Twitter dynamics have changed significantly since the time period he was talking about.

I always get suspicious when I hear the term "almost certainly."