Thomas Cook troll served with court order via Twitter
The anonymous owner of Twitter account @TCXrated has been told to reveal his name and address through a court order served through the social media account on behalf of Thomas Cook.
The tour operator believes that the person who runs the account, who tweets abusive comments about Thomas Cook, may be an employee, because a picture of an internal memorandum to staff was tweeted.
The picture of the memorandum, which asked staff to stop criticising Thomas Cook on social networking sites, was accompanied by the comment "If Thomas Cook wants people to stop slagging them on Twitter etc, then maybe they should start giving a decent service."
Matthew Richardson, barrister for Thomas Cook Airlines Ltd, told the judge: "Recently a person or persons unknown have set up and begun to operate a Twitter account registered in the name @TCXrated.
"The Twitter account is posting a number of unsavoury posts about Thomas Cook but also posting confidential internal memoranda and trade information.
"The nature of the posts gives us reason to suspect that @TCXrated is an employee and thus acting in breach of his contract of employment.
"@TCXrated is anonymous and has sought to remain so. It is submitted that the court should in infer that this is a deliberate and unreasonable attempt to avoid having to answer for the action of operating the Twitter account.”