Twitter Should Hire Curt Schilling as Sheriff (Seriously)

Former professional baseball player Curt Schilling is a blowhard—and he would probably be the first to agree with me on this point. A contrarian to the core, Schilling has never been shy about expressing his conservative political ideologies, views on evolution, and some other stuff that usually gets more liberal folks like me in a tizzy.

However, Schilling is also the man who helped carry the Boston Red Sox to their first World Series in 86 years, and he did it with half his ankle hanging off. So because of his status as a Boston sports hero, it's easy for me to mentally separate Schilling the badass pitcher with the blood-soaked sock from the Schilling I disagree with on pretty much everything else.

That said, there are lots of reasons other people don't like Schilling, even when it's for reasons that are not as black and white as his critics would claim. An avid gamer, he launched 38 Studios, a gaming studio that was largely bankrolled by the state of Rhode Island. When it failed spectacularly, causing many to lose their jobs, the blame fell on Schilling. What people either don't know or choose to ignore is that little Rhody's money came with the condition the company create a significant number of jobs whether they were necessary or not. And when you're an early startup, if you're not lean, you're dead.

Then last year, Schilling got cancer, but even that didn't stop the Internet trolls from claiming it was some kind of retribution for his failed Rhode Island venture. Like I said, there are plenty of reasons why people don't like Curt Schilling.

However, there is a new reason to love Schilling that has nothing to do with baseball. Within the span of a few days, Schilling has accomplished what Twitter has failed at for so long: exposing trolls for all the world to see, and enacting sweet, satisfying retribution. In case you missed it, Schilling sent out a congratulatory tweet on February 25 to his daughter:

Congrats to Gabby Schilling who will pitch for the Salve Regina Seahawks next year!!

— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) February 25, 2015

What followed was some of the most vile replies you could ever imagine, even for Twitter. Schilling, never one to back down from anything, proceeded to write a post on his personal blog, exposing these trolls, which included a student, a college DJ, and a part-time New York Yankees ticket seller, who has since been fired.

I urge you to read Schilling's post, not only to see what horrible things were actually tweeted to him about his daughter, but to witness the beautiful, swift, and exacting take-down Schilling single-handedly orchestrated, exposing these people's identities, and ultimately taking steps to have at least some of them potentially prosecuted as sex offenders. The lives of these trolls are forever changed, and they get whatever legal retribution they have coming to them.

I've written before about Twitter's horribly inadequate practices for cracking down on trolls, and even proposed that users be fined by the company for any abusive content they create. I was more or less laughed at for that idea, but after seeing how Schilling made such quick work of his daughter's cyber bullies, they probably wish they could pay a fine and have everyone forget about what came spewing from their twisted little minds in 140-character bursts. But thanks to Schilling, those people will forever need to deal with what they said. They are one Google search away from never getting another job, never dating a woman, or doing anything that would be thwarted by unsavory Google search results. Their lives as they knew them are over.

So there you are, Dick Costolo. That's how you take down trolls on your platform. I suggest you give Mr. Schilling a call, and then offer him some kind of role working towards making your platform be known more for its triumphs than its ugly embarrassments.