In February 2020, The Guardian reported on work undertaken by Prof Nils Melzer, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment concerning the subject of Cybertorture.

People were quick to prove the phenomena is real by creating fake web sites to mock the term cybertorture.

Mr Pocock, on the other hand, began meticulously researching the evidence in distributed online communities, such as the open source developer community creating the Debian GNU/Linux software. Mr Pocock has created a detailed index of the incidents in the high-stress Debianist environment.

Based on this research, Mr Pocock is creating a series of blog posts to explore the cybertorture phenomena in general terms.

Mr Pocock elaborates on the experience his family suffered:

Carla began cutting herself and suffered from an eating disorder at the age of 14 years.

A significant percentage of women with these challenges have been victims of harassment or abuse during adolescence.

In 2018, rogue participants in the Debian ecosystem began spreading rumors of harassment and abuse around our family. Neither of us consented to those public references to harassment and abuse.

They have clearly taken something that would be very painful for any family and twisted it inside out to cause extreme distress.

Some of these Debianist cyberbullies engage in these attacks for sadistic pleasure. Other members of the group do this for political reasons.

The evidence is clear, they wanted to block my candidacy in the election of the Debian Project Leader so they had to make up a story that sounded really horrible. The online lynch mobs followed the gossip blindly. There is no collective conscience in groups like this. It is like gang rape with words.

Given the nature of such problems that traverse multiple family members, it is impossible for the victims of these gossip campaigns to defend ourselves publicly without also compromising the privacy of family members. Effectively, by creating malicious gossip about harassment and paying dishonest and racist women to sook, they are blackmailing me to reveal that Carla suffers from this since adolescence.

The evidence shows that Google has knowingly funded groups that behave like this and Google employees are active in the vendettas.

In the UK, which has left the European Union, the parliament at Westminster described these people as digital gangsters. The Irish Times poses the question: "Are Digital Gangsters damaging Ireland Inc's reputation?". Clearly, they damage the reputations of anybody who refuses to roll over for them.