Deal or No Deal presenter wants online responsibility after student set up 'Somebody please kill Noel Edmonds' page

Deal or No Deal host Noel Edmonds has called for more online responsibility after arranging a face-to-face meeting with a so-called internet troll who set up a Facebook page called "Somebody please kill Noel Edmonds".

Edmonds said in a video on website iwannameet that people using social networking websites should police their own behaviour more effectively before they are censored by the "state and politicians".

Edmonds said in the video that he does not use social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, adding that last month's meeting with the student who set up the page "taught" him about social media.

"It proved to me that this is an incredible communications weapon but like all weapons it can be used for bad as well as good and what we have got to encourage people that use social media to do is act with more responsibility," Edmonds said.

"Because if people are not more responsible you know what is going to happen – the state, those politicians are going to take this huge freedom away, they will try and control it in a way they try and control so many things and that I believe would be an absolute disaster for society and would have massive ramifications for all of us in the future. So responsible use of social media is absolutely vital to life in Britain."

The TV presenter was alerted to the page by the internet monitoring company Web Sheriff which arranged last month's meeting between the student and Edmonds and his management team.

Edmonds, whose 40-year TV and radio career includes work on the BBC1 Saturday night hit Noel's House Party in the 1990s, said in the video that he was pleased he decided to meet the student rather than alert the police.

"We shook hands … it was very much a student prank in its origins, no doubt alcohol was involved and he was very apologetic and realised the seriousness of what he had done," Edmonds said of the meeting.

Last month Liam Stacey, a 21-year-old biology student from Swansea, was sentenced to 56 days in prison after posting racist messages on Twitter, triggered by the collapse of Bolton footballer Fabrice Muamba.

A few days before that Newcastle University student Joshua Cryer was given a two-year community order for racist Twitter messages sent to former England footballer Stan Collymore.

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