Claudia friend’s ‘troll’ torment at hands of internet monsters

A Facebook page was set up within hours of the missing person inquiry being launched, while Claudia’s father, Peter, also created a website for anyone to report any information that could help.

As the days turned into weeks and North Yorkshire Police upgraded the missing person inquiry to a murder investigation, the case began to make headlines across the country.

What Miss Cooper did not realise as she continued to try and spread and gather information about her friend, was she was setting herself up to face years of abuse from so-called “internet trolls”, anonymous web users who seek vulnerable victims to bully.

She says the severity of the attacks has left her traumatised and less trusting of the world.

Even as recently as February this year, trolls bombarded the Claudia Lawrence Facebook site, posting sexually explicit and offensive messages on the page and revelling in the reaction from Claudia’s friends and family.

Meanwhile, anonymous personal abuse against Miss Cooper, 47, of York, and another close friend of Claudia’s on the website set up by Peter Lawrence became so severe that he was forced to take down the message board.

“In February this year, Facebook tried to update the site, at that point we had 22,000 members but we ended up with 37,” Miss Cooper said.

“That is when the trolls came in.

“The members who were still on there had to put out messages to everybody on their sites asking them to return to the group.

“Because we wanted to get the members back on to the group as quickly as possible, we didn’t really monitor who was coming in.

“We got these people, who I believe were in Australia, and started putting really horrible stuff in.

“It was ridiculous comments and jokes talking about paedophiles and stuff like that.

“One troll got in and started inviting his troll friends. We don’t really know if their names were real or not. Luckily, we got them removed from the site very quickly by Facebook.

“They were not out to get Claudia, but they seemed to get some sort of sick entertainment from it all.

“It was people’s reactions that they thrived on, then they would respond in an even sicker way.”

Miss Cooper says much of the personal abuse she has received was from people who believe that they know what happened to Claudia and are trying to “play detective”.

On one occasion a picture of her was put online accompanied by the caption, “guilty or what? Look at the face”.

She says for those being bullied online there is an element of self-harm in that it is very difficult just to switch it off and ignore the abuse.

While she did not report any of the comments to the police, she believes there needs to be some monitoring of internet sites.

“There is one category of people that just like to bring misery into other people’s lives,” she added.

“There is a second category of people that just want to be right.

“At times I absolutely dreaded logging on.

“I always dreaded what I was going to read but I didn’t stop and almost couldn’t help but read it.

“It is a bit of a morbid fascination.

“There was another friend who suffered exactly the same sort of abuse as I did but she stopped going on Facebook.

“Some people would find it easier to brush off but I do care what people think and I find it hurtful.

“At the same time Claudia has suffered a lot more because she is not here.

“It is a small price to pay.

“It has changed my life and I do feel I am definitely less trusting of people.

“It wasn’t threatening stuff, just horrible.

“Social networking is still a new thing and we really don’t know what the consequences of it are.

“With a missing person case you don’t expect people to be nasty about it.

“That was my perception at the time but now that has changed.

“I feel it can be quite a damaging thing but a good thing as well – the support has far outweighed the abuse.

“Maybe there are more people because these are not necessarily people who would be violent or say anything in a face to face situation, but they can hide themselves behind a computer now.

“They do not have to be responsible for their actions.”