The comments section is a place to vent. It’s also often the place where rationality goes to die.

Eyewitness News (EWN) has banned a user on its Facebook page who trolled a Cape Town woman, Berenice Vietri, claiming that she was recruiting for ISIS (Islamic State).

EWN online news editor, Sheldon Morais, said that he heard about the trolling on Saturday, and decided to delete the comments from the site.

Here’s News24 with more from Morais:

We urgently identified the user’s offensive comments and deleted them immediately as they were clearly in contravention of our comment policy,” he told News24.

“A decision was also taken to ban the user as he had contravened the policy more than three times in a very short space of time.”

Morais said a staff member spoke to Vietri twice to assure her the matter was being taken seriously and that they had removed the troll’s offensive comments on their platforms.

While EWN promotes freedom of speech, their policy prohibits threatening, inciting, inflammatory, abusive, defamatory, obscene, vulgar or profane language.

Vietri, who is recovering from breast cancer and chemotherapy, was having a conversation with another user about an assisted dying court ruling covered by the news site.

At this point, the man dubbed ‘the ISIS troll’ came online and started “ranting and raving like a lunatic”.

“He [the troll] had compiled an identikit of myself and he wrote my name and my surname on there, saying this is the woman who recruited the 15-year-old for ISIS”, Vietri said.

She said that the news organisation eventually deleted the allegations from its page and assured that they were following up from their side.

The so-called troll, operating from a fake Facebook profile, then flooded her Facebook inbox with numerous messages, which were shown to News24.

The messages are largely written in capitals and contain obscene and sexually explicit language, images and threats. The troll uses male pronouns, calls himself God and Troll, refers to the complainant as Zombie and claims to have orchestrated the deaths of people here and overseas, some in the public eye.

Clearly a very unwell individual.

Cape Town police are investigating a case of common assault. No arrest has been made yet, but they are intent on capturing the culprit.

I doubt this will slow the troll army down, because they clearly have nothing better to do with their time, but it’s a start.

[source:news24]