Man Thrown in Jail for Trolling Facebook Pages
Unemployed 36-year-old Colm Coss has been jailed for 18 weeks after trolling Facebook memorial sites and posting "abusive messages." He was charged after sending letters to neighbors containing his address, photos of himself and bragging about being a troll.
Coss, who lives in Manchester, apparently liked to create fake Facebook accounts and mess with people on tribute sites for the late British reality star Jade Goody (pictured) and John Paul Massey, a kid who had been mauled to death by a dog. Mess how? Well, apparently Coss liked to tell his new Facebook friends that he'd had sex with Goody and Massey's corpses.
Which is, don't get me wrong, totally gross and weird, but... did the Brits really make it illegal? Ha, duh, it's the U.K., of course they did. The Communications Act of 2003 outlaws "sending malicious communications that [are] grossly offensive." So, there's one difference between the U.S. and the U.K.: In the U.S., we take these matters into our own hands and try to murder people who troll us on the internet.