At the end of January This American Life, my favorite NPR program, produced a show that I think everyone allowed on the Internet should have to listen to.
I found this particular episode through a piece Lindy West, the woman running the first segment, wrote for the Guardian. West is a feminist, body positive writer who gets a lot of hate for doing just that. One day, amongst the piles of harassment, she found an a tweet purportedly from her dead father.
The name on the account was “PawWestDonezo”, because my father’s name was Paul West, and a difficult battle with prostate cancer had rendered him “donezo” (goofy slang for “done”) just 18 months earlier. “Embarrassed father of an idiot,” the bio read. “Other two kids are fine, though.” His location was “Dirt hole in Seattle”
West blogged about the horror of seeing her dead father’s face attached to the account with one of her trolls, and the guy behind the account got back to her, apologizing for acting like a terrible human. In the This American Life episode, they talk on the phone for the first time.
For the most part, our commenters here on the Range keep it in line—I recently spent an afternoon clearing out years of reported comments. Ya’ll aren’t so bad. But I think it’s a good thing to remember, no matter where you’re off commenting. The Internet can give you anonymity, but it’s still okay to behave like it doesn’t.
This article appears in Jan 29 – Feb 4, 2015.
Here is a trick for you. Search google for PawWestDonezo. If he truly, truly existed and used twitter for 3 years, there should be evidence of him.
Guess what? There isn’t. Whole thing is made up. Only hits you get from Google (as of writing this) for PawWestDonezo or “PawWestDonezo Twitter” are:
The Guardian story
Alternet which is copy of The Guardian
This site
Let me ask you: Do you know ANYONE who has managed to delete every single instance of existence from 3 years. On internet. Let me tell you, people with real, and I mean REAL, power have tried to delete stuff that is merely 1 hour old and existed on one site and even they failed.
Now I am to expect that a random troll managed to delete 3 years worth of existence?
First false story about Wikipedia banning feminist editors and now this. What happened to truth?
Tommi – Read West’s article again: He harassed her online and soon after that she wrote about it and he apologized and deleted the account. Then, after a few years, she had TAL get in touch with him. The three years mentioned in her intro only says that for the past three years she’s been constantly harassed.
Considering I ended up here after listening to a podcast about trolls, and commenters refusing to listen to facts, the first comment is hilarious.
Most online trolls that I have encountered in comments sections will forever remain anonymous, and they are very good at ruining decent, intelligent debate. Maybe this guy sobered up and was making amends – maybe.