Celebrities

Newspaper shocks readers by publishing full names and pictures of men threatening Greta Thunberg on Facebook

Newspaper shocks readers by publishing full names and pictures of men threatening Greta Thunberg on Facebook

Greta Thunburg has to put up with a lot of criticism and trolling –​ often from powerful people, like the president of America, who really should know better.

But since the teen climate justice activist burst on to the world stage last year, she’s also been the subject of vitriol from a lot of anonymous people too. Everything, from her autism to her age and looks, has been picked apart and made fun of. And in the worst cases, the trolling has veered towards threats and abuse.

Over the weekend, Thunberg attended and spoke at a climate strike event in Bristol. Tens of thousands of people turned out to hear her speak and join a march around the city centre to call on governments and corporations to tackle rising global temperatures.

But it turns out that not everyone in the British city was pleased to see her.

Local paper the Bristol Post noticed that whenever they posted articles covering Thunberg’s work, they were inundated with negative comments. They decided to take matters into their own hands having seen a worrying rise in threatening or violent comments about the teen activist on Facebook.

The pape​r then named and shamed several of the people who had made such comments about Thunberg.

Some of these people were parents of grandparents themselves. Others had stickers on their profile pictures imploring people to “be kind” –​ a mantra that has become popular on social media following the death of TV presenter Caroline Flack.

To give you a rough idea of the comments, here’s a selection of some that were linked to specific Facebook users by the Bristol paper.

Crush the b***h. Sounds good to me. Send her home

Her parents need to slap her with a brick.

She should be burnt at the stake!

Can someone grab her pigtails and ms trunchable her over the fence

It seems ridiculous that this even needs to be said, but a young woman should obviously be able to make her voice heard without being threatened with physical violence by strangers online.

Read the Bristol Post’s full report here.

More: Horrifying cartoon of Greta Thunberg being sexually assaulted linked to Canadian oil company

The Conversation (0)
x