This weekend, ESPN analyst and former MLB pitcher Curt Schilling blogged about Twitter trolls harassing his daughter after Schilling’s congratulated her for getting accepted to college. Schilling also did some amateur sleuthing of his own, and found some background information on a couple of the trolls. Their Twitter comments have resulted in severe discipline from their colleges or employers.
One of the trolls was suspended by Brookdale Community College.
Students and community members have rightfully expressed concerns regarding recent social media comments made by a Brookdale student.
The Twitter comments posted by this student are unacceptable and clearly violate the standards of conduct that are expected of all Brookdale students.
The student has been summarily suspended and will be scheduled for a conduct hearing where further disciplinary action will be taken. The Brookdale Police are actively investigating this matter. Brookdale takes this behavior very seriously and does not tolerate any form of harassment.
Our sincerest apologies to Gabby Schilling. Her achievement should be celebrated and not clouded by offensive comments.
Another was fired from his part-time job with the Yankees as a ticket seller.
MacDonald was hired as a part-time ticket seller for the New York Yankees at the end of January, according to Jason Zillo, the team’s director of communications.
Zillo said MacDonald worked about 18 hours over four days for the Yankees. Zillo said MacDonald was fired today.
“We have zero tolerance for anything like this,” Zillo said. “We’ve terminated him.”
Schilling’s been making the rounds on radio shows this morning, and had some strong comments about the situation on WEEI’s Dennis and Callahan.
“It’s not a mistake,” Schilling said. “People talk about making mistakes as a kid — listen, I’ve made a million mistakes — these are conscious decisions because a mistake is saying you know what, ‘You’re a tool,’ and going on and saying, ‘Oh gosh, I shouldn’t of said that’ and going back and deleting it. This was over and over and over. You could see at some point they all thought what the hell is he going to do to me and they got worse and eventually it got to the point where I said OK, I need to fix this.”
“A couple of these guys, this stuff will follow them around for the rest of their lives because I am going to make sure it does,” he added.
[…]
“I’ve forgiven them, but they are never going to be able to out live this,” he said. “This is with them for the rest of their lives. This is not a mistake. Let me be very clear, these kids didn’t make a mistake. They made conscious decisions to talk about rape, and sex and defiling a 17-year-old girl. What part of the news are these people not seeing on a daily basis where kids on a daily basis are killing themselves from being cyber bullied?”
While Schilling is definitely fighting the good fight here, I’m just worried that all this will do is encourage even more anonymity from Twitter trolls. Going on the warpath can take care of people that leave personal information on their account, but there’s not much you can do when someone is an egg with a fake name and nothing but hateful tweets.
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