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Abstract - While trolling has existed as a term since the 1990s and as a reality even earlier there has been an exponential increase in the prevalence of the abusive kind - 'flame trolling'. Mistakenly the media calls these flame trollers, 'trolls', when in fact there are more often than not 'Snerts' and 'E-Vengers'. The justice system in Great Britain has taken a sporadic approach to dealing with flame trolling, and the wide range of legislation that has existed since the 1980s has no strategic method to assign its usage on the basis of the nature of the flame trolling as its use often depends on the whim of different police forces. This paper hopes to change this. After a brief presentation of the background of Internet trolling in Great Britain and in general a new framework is presented. This allows prosecutors to easily classify flame trolling based on the facts of the case and pick the appropriate level based on the severity.
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1 Introduction
Despite being one of the greatest innovations of all time, the Internet is less safe than one might have expected it to be considering one is often simply sitting in front of a computer screen at one's home. Internet abuse (IA) is rife and despite differences in how it is defined and the specific criteria used, there is general agreement that IA can be explained in terms of the negative effect of Internet use, that is, Internet use that causes disturbances in an individual's life [1]. It has been argued that Internet abuse is a mild form of Internet addiction [2], but there is a lack of evidence to support this claim. While technological approaches have been taken to combating IA [3], it was clear for many governments at the start on the 21s century that legislation was also needed to reinforce these techniques. Recently, the term 'trolling' has become a catch-all term for this sort of Internet abuse [4], but this is a simple view of the situation. Technically the abusive element of trolling could be called 'flame trolling' and the more positive aspects could be called 'kudos trolling'. This paper will deal mainly with the former.
It was once mistakenly...