Senior Tory MPs have urged the Government to take urgent action and back the proposals, which hope to curb offenders’ behaviour before it escalates.
Their pleas came after a journalist accused the social media giant of protecting the mean who harassed her, and failed to take her claims seriously.
Rosamund Urwin, who works for The Sunday Times, wrote a piece explaining how a man who had escaped a secure unit turned up at her office.
She revealed how despite him sending repeated “sexual and threatening” comments online, Twitter said he had not violated their terms of service.
Describing her harrowing ordeal she said: “At every step, it has felt like my stalker’s rights trump mine.”
In response the former Tory cabinet minister Nicky Morgan said Twitter has become a "platform for misogyny and worse".
Her colleague Sarah Wollaston has put forward a bill including new “stalking protection orders”, and will be read in the House of Commons in November.
It would allow magistrates to create tailor-made sanctions to prevent stalkers from harassing their victims, such as forcing them to declare their aliases or ban them from using encrypted software.
In extreme cases offenders could be banned from using the internet altogether.
Breaking any order would be a criminal offence.
Dr Wollaston, who chairs the health and social care committee, told the Telegraph: “If you’ve got a stalker who is almost exclusively online stalking, the order could say they have to register all their aliases and use computer equipment which can track what they have been doing.”
She added: “None of this legislation will work by itself unless organisations like Twitter do their bit and take stuff down.
“I think they have a responsibility to take this much more seriously than they are at the moment.”
Another Tory MP, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, said: “It cannot be acceptable that public figures who are victims of stalking via Twitter have to suffer continued ordeal and live in constant fear”.
Source: Read Full Article