Bradley Paul Hampson

Amid all the brouhaha about trolling, trolls and what is to be done about them, one simple fact has been mostly overlooked. And that is at least in its more extreme forms, trolling is already illegal. You only have to look at Part 10.6 of the Criminal Code.

That part of the code provides that a person may be guilty of an offence if they use a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence. This is defined by the “reasonable person” test: that is, what a reasonable person might find offensive “in all the circumstances”. Sounds a bit nebulous, doesn’t it?

Most reasonable people, though, would find the behaviour of Bradley Paul Hampson offensive. Hampson was sentenced to three years’ jail in March 2011 (later commuted to six months) for defacing the Facebook pages of two murdered children with child exploitation material.

A year earlier, a woman was handed a suspended sentence for a similar offence. The trolls who buried Charlotte Dawson’s Twitter feed under an avalanche of invitations to commit suicide might have cause to be nervous, as would the halfwit who taunted Wests Tigers’ captain Robbie Farah over his mother’s passing.

Then there’s James Vincent McKenzie. McKenzie is the nom de plume used by the person who has devoted years to systematically stalking/defaming writer Marieke Hardy on his Google-owned blogspot.… Read more..