A GLASGOW teenager whose plight prompted Theresa May to call on social media giants to crackdown on online bullying is to take his experiences into the classroom.

Declan Duncan, who endured years of harassment over his ill health and sexuality, has told how he now plans to build on the profile his case has had and encourage young people to speak out.

Declan, 17, came out as gay four years ago, leading to a petition on social media site Facebook by people from his school calling for him to be run out of his area.

Targeted throughout both primary and secondary school, bullies created fake profiles in his name and using his photographs.

There was also an effort, organised on Facebook, to co-ordinate a group that planned to attack him at school with tomatoes and eggs and drive him from the building.

But after Theresa May warned companies like Facebook and Twitter that they had a responsibility to prevent their sites being abused. after Declan’s case was raised by his local MP, Stewart McDonald, the teenager said he now feels confident about turning his years of abuse into a positive.

He said: “What I’m going to do now, is go into classrooms and tell them my story, do presentations on the whole online bullying problem.

“I want to show what I had to come through, how I got through that and perhaps give some young people who are going through something similar a role model.

“I feel I now have the confidence to do this having been through a lot.”

Declan, from the Castlemilk area on Glasgow’s south side, said he had a lot of positive feedback since being mentioned at the House of Commons last week.

“True friends”, he said, had been very supportive while he had received a large number of friends requests on his Facebook page.

“People who have heard my story have been in contact and just want to know more”, he said.

He also endorses Mrs May’s stance that social media companies need to do more to tackle online abuse.

Declan said: “They should actually intervene before the issue gets so serious. I don’t want it to reach a stage for other people that they’re too frightened to go to school because of the abuser they’ve had. I was even too afraid to leave the house because of what was happening online. It leads into real life. You can’t get away from it.

“Bullies were contacting me through private messages, messages were being posted about me, other people were just making stuff about me

“A crackdown would really help those people like me who are on the receiving end of this abuse.

“There should be more accounts closed, people taken off line and given warnings about their behaviour.”

At Westminster Mr McDonald, the SNP MP for Glasgow South, told Mrs May that social media had been the “weapon” used against his constituent.

“Bullies tried literally to run him out of his own hometown,” he said “making his life a misery.”

Mr McDonald said that the companies should be held to account because their platforms were too “easily used by those who try to harass and bully others”.

He had heard Declan’s story after attending a LGBT youth support group within his constituency.

Declan said: “Stewart had come along, he heard my story and it really just escalated from there.”

Mrs May told Mr McDonald that while she thought that social media could also be “abused and ill-used by people who wish to bully others”.

She warned multi-national social platforms that they had to address the issue, preferably through their “terms and conditions” rather than government action.

She said: “There are members of this house who have suffered significantly as a result of bullying and trolling on social media. The Home Office is well appraised of this as an issue, has been over the years.”