While seeking tougher laws to battle Twitter trolls which he experienced, NRL star Robbie Farah himself made a similar offending tweet in 2011 to Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

For the prime minister's 50th birthday in September, Mr Farah wished a noose for Ms Gillard in response to a tweet from another former league star and current Triple M radio host Mark Geyer.

The captain of the West Tigers apologised for the gaffe. In a statement on Wednesday, Mr Farah said, "I make no excuse and offer my sincere apologies. I can only say that I have learnt a lot in recent days and I hope that everyone in the community can learn about the pain that we can cause through such comments."

"At the time I did think about what I had done and removed the 'tweet' soon after posting it but that of course doesn't repair the damage," admitted Mr Farah who sought the identity of another tweeter who wrote offending comments about the death of his mother, Sonia, in June of pancreatic cancer.

Mr Farah's tweet could have gone unnoticed but Karalee Evans, the senior director and APAC digital strategist for Text100, a public relations firm, used a Twitter tool, Topsy, to search for the offending tweet and posted it. For such a move, Ms Evans is now the subject of trolls from Mr Farah's football fans.

Mr Farah described the offending tweets about his mother as "an experience that has highlighted the hurtful nature of unthinking comments and even those which are sometimes put forward as black humour." He took the incident to admit having committed the same offense against Ms Gillard.

Mr Farah complained to the police about the offending tweets concerning his deceased mother, which led Communications Minister Stephen Conroy to ask U.S.-based Twitter to turn over evidence against the tweeter, who had deleted his account. However, Twitter refused to cooperate.

Because of the furor created by the Twitter trolls, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) issued on Wednesday a five-point guideline designed to protect Internet users from cyber trolls. The guidelines advised troll victims to ignore, block and report the trolls as well as talk to friends and family and protect friends from trolls.

"Hopefully the whole situation will only serve to encourage everyone to think about what we are really saying before we hit the 'send' key," Mr Farah said.

The incident caused #stopthetrolls and Robbie Farah to be trending topics on Twitter on Wednesday.

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