A documentary in Channel 4's True Stories strand, My Social Network Stalker was a grim and upsetting real life tale with a huge and alarming flaw in its delivery.

Ruth Jeffery, we were told in her testimony with interjections from her father, mother and older sister, was subject to years of online intimidation from an anonymous source who repeatedly posted naked pictures - at first photoshopped images but then actual, stolen shots - onto the internet for anyone to see. In tandem with this attack, the stalker also sent emails to her family and friends containing links to the images and managed to evade the police for quite some time.

In fact, the police seemed either too constrained by law or too busy to do much about it. Though it seemed quite obvious that Shane Webber - Ruth's boyfriend and childhood sweetheart - was responsible, the closest they got to rumbling him involved them warning one of his friends that he was guilty of harassment after Shane had blamed his best mate to cover his own back. Shane had also sent emails and posted updates threatening the stalker, despite the culprit being himself. 

Lasting for an hour, you got all the insight into how utterly miserable this dreadful and malicious campaign made the family that you could possibly need, and it was impossible to come away from the programme without complete sympathy for Ruth, a troubled and haunted girl who's clearly been hugely affected by having this controlling and malevolent force in her life for such a long time. You also felt for her family - the mother who found it hard to deal with the trauma, the sister who was also suffering the same fate of photoshopped images to a lesser effect and also Ruth's father, who managed to identify Shane as the suspect himself after doing some digging, despite his being a self-confessed technophobe.

The central problem with My Social Network Stalker, and one that might have left you completely and utterly flabbergasted, was the fact that Channel 4 chose to show the thinly pixellated pictures of Ruth in question, during lingering reconstructions that added nothing to the testimony. Even worse, photos that had been uploaded to some nasty site or other with 'tributes' to Ruth's unwanted public portfolio were splashed across the screen later on, with anonymous pictures of male admirers in an excited state, showing themselves beside print outs of the images Shane had uploaded, increasing viewer discomfort to maximum velocity. Whether or not Ruth had approved the pictures being displayed or had even asked for the programme to feature them in some kind of show of strength wasn't mentioned, so you were left wondering what on earth Channel 4 thought they were doing.

Shane Webber was locked up for four months of a possible six, and we were shown Ruth gaining a faint sense of closure as he was driven away from court in a police van. You had to wonder if, watching the show back and seeing how Channel 4 had treated the reconstruction segments, Ruth's old wounds might've been opened up all over again, and all because of a terrible editorial decision.