Hackers on Steroids (17 page)

All of this when his family were just going through the initial shock and trauma of losing the boy. Those, non-troll, who opine in the media or all over the Net that it’s just the Internet, don’t take it so seriously, you can just turn the computer off, are seriously lacking in themselves any real capacity for empathy and should mostly just be ignored. They are spewing on a subject on which they lack the mental and emotional faculties to understand. This kind of thing is a serious assault on people, the effects of which may never truly wear off - or at least take a long time to do so. And exactly how many families out there have also went through exactly what the Mullaneys have been subjected to? Thousands upon thousands of people the world over have been the victims of this on Facebook alone. Grief on its own is bad enough, but the horror of having your deceased son or daughter’s photograph doctored with and made into a plaything for psychopathic sadists in your hour of greatest need is unimaginable. Using the report button isn’t much good once the damage has already been done. Once seen, some things truly cannot be unseen. This is a really serious subject, and if this wasn’t on its own reason enough for Facebook to be put under pressure by governments to change how profiles first come onto its system, then are many other types of horror story to be told here as well.

There have been a lot of murders associated with Facebook, but in most of these cases the social network isn’t at fault. Numerous women have changed their relationship status on their profiles or have been seen stepping out with new men in photographs that they have placed onto the site, and been murdered by jealous ex’s because of it. Fights that had begun or were incited further on Facebook have also led to murder, most notably a triple shooting slaying of three teenage boys in Pennsylvania in January 2012. Also in 2012, in an extreme case of Internet-rage, a 60-year-old Tennessee man tracked down and shot dead a young couple for removing his daughter from their Facebook friend lists. In none of those cases, however, can the website itself be faulted. It just done what it is meant to do: it gave real people real cyber networking profiles and linked them together with others who wanted the same. No reasonable person could find fault with the website in cases like this.

But there are some murder cases linked to the website and that Facebook should indeed share in the blame for. All of them were committed by men who had set up fake profiles on the site and used them to lure their female victims into real-world meetings at which they were all brutally murdered. The first of these victims was 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall and whose bound body was found dumped in a field in County Durham, England, on October 26th 2009. She had left her home the night before to meet who she thought was a teenage lad by the name of Pete Cartwright. Pete Cartwright, or DJ Pete as he said he was also known as, had contacted her through a Facebook account that sported as its profile picture what the prosecution at her killer’s murder trial said was ‘a bare-chested and good-looking boy, who is apparently in his late teens.’  ‘Pete Cartwright’ was actually a toothless and wasted 32-year-old serial rapist by the name of Peter Chapman and when he got Ashleigh Hall into his car, by pretending that he was ‘DJ Pete’s’ father, he drove her away, bound her with tape and then raped and murdered her before dumping her body. Her mother, Andrea Hall, told a newspaper: ‘It is time somebody introduced controls which stop people putting up false information. The people who run Facebook have a responsibility.’ Facebook said that they were ‘deeply saddened.’

Seven months after the murder that ‘deeply saddened’ Facebook, another teenage girl went to meet another individual who was not as he pretended to be on the social network. 18-year-old Noma Belomesoff from Sydney thought that she had been offered her dream job of working with animals at an Australian animal rescue centre. A ‘Jason Green’ had contacted her on Facebook to offer her the job and she went off to meet him on five different occasions. Jason Green was actually 20-year-old Christopher Dannevig, who was at the time on parole for kidnapping a woman. He had created the Jason Green identity on Facebook after talking to Noma Belomesoff on another website and learning from her that she had a deep concern for animal welfare and dreamed of finding work which would allow her to care for sick and wounded animals. On all the occasions on which they had met they had gone out to the Australian bush for what Dannevig pretended was training for the job. On the fifth occasion they got into an argument. Dannevig pushed the girl over and then held her underwater for two minutes, drowning her. He then took her bank card and went and withdrew money from her account.

In South Africa in 2011, 23-year-old Thabo Bester lured a number of women into meeting with him via the use of numerous fake identities on Facebook. He would lure them to hotel rooms with promises of modelling work where he would rape and then rob them. On one of those occasions, in September of that year, he murdered 26-year-old model Nomfundu Tyulu by stabbing her in the chest in a room in a bed and breakfast in Cape Town.

Three young lives all sacrificed on the altar of Facebook’s easy signup system. While Facebook didn’t actually murder the victims itself, it was grossly, criminally, negligent in allowing the murderers to so easily register with fake profiles that they then used to lure those females to their deaths. I wonder if the company could be financially brought to account for their part in the deaths? If they were forced to pay out large sums of money for deaths like these and for the psychological trauma endured by the victims of RIP trolling, something is telling me that they’d soon really tighten up the process which allows people to make accounts on the site.

Something that they could very quickly do and do even before getting around to looking at how they can stop the fakes coming on in the first place, is to do something about how the memorial pages on its site are made. At the moment, and even after all the years of trouble with RIP trolling on the site and even after all the police action and all the media attention, RIP trolls can still operate as easily as ever on Facebook, and just anyone can simply go and set up an RIP page for someone. This is a problem, not least because trolls will often set them up themselves to try and ensnare unsuspecting people into coming onto them. Facebook need to have it so that memorial pages have a category all of their own and that they have a setting which means that they can only go live after it has been confirmed that they are real and operated by someone who was a friend or a relative of the deceased person in question. It would also be a good idea if on these specially classed pages that posts can only go onto them once they have been approved by the administrators of the page, in a default setting which should not have the option of being changed. Any page made about someone who has died and that hasn’t been designated by the maker as an RIP page should be automatically locked down from view to anyone, including the maker. Software could easily locate such pages by scanning for certain words and phrases. 

That should really cut down on the number of fake RIP pages that litter Facebook. Because, you know what: Some of those RIP pages, just like the trolls are always saying, are indeed made by people with no connection whatsoever to the deceased, and I find that ghoulish, disturbing behaviour too. It obviously doesn’t make it right in any way to troll them – or certainly not to troll them with obscenities about the dead person in question - as that is almost inevitably going to find its way back to the real grieving people, and of course trolls only use all of this as an excuse anyway with them attacking not just the pages but the names of the dead people themselves. If these trolls really were interested only in satirising parasitic so-called memorial pages made by attention-seeking nitwits with no connections to the dead people in question they’d simply make fake RIP pages for people who never existed and then lure people into coming onto them to speak of how their hearts are breaking at the story of this made-up person’s tragic death. But that would lack totally the real pain that these creatures find nourishment in.

Those who engage in such behaviour like putting up ‘memorial’ pages for people whom they didn’t know are setting up big shiny targets for trolls and do so with no permission whatsoever from the families of the dead people whose names they are borrowing to indulge themselves in such garish displays of pseudo-grief. There is no call for it, and those who are lacking in their lives whatever it is that possesses them to do such a thing as set up a ‘memorial’ page for a complete stranger and for complete strangers to post on really need to have a good long think about what it is that they are doing. It is intrusive and just totally morbid, and of course egotistical as well. Like the RIP trolls, you too are some sort of weird necro-parasite feeding on the dead and so on that level the same as those trolls. You may go about it in a different way but you’re lacking something, you really are lacking something. There is just no way that you can actually be in mourning. You may have been touched by the death but you’re not grieving. Stop it. If there is a genuine sympathy page and you are moved to do so then go and offer your condolences to the family on it, but stop making an ‘event’ out of some stranger’s death. How you cheapen and make a circus out of real tragedy with your vulgar displays of boredom and egotistical neediness manifested as false grief, the mirror image of the RIP trolls whom you probably claim to despise.

After some of the more widely reported tragedies you will sometimes have the obscene spectacle of rival ‘memorial’ pages operated by people who were completely unknown to the dead person in question and that are in essence competing with each other to see who can get the most ‘likes,’ the name of the dead child now a commodity for the egos of the sad and desperate illiterates of the Web. Some of the administrators of such I have even observed slagging off other RIP pages bearing the same ‘brand name’ in an attempt to take people from them and onto theirs. If the ‘memorial’ pages in question are made in the name of a murdered child they will often be, far from being respectful and solemn places, covered with photoshops of the alleged child killer with a noose around him; or if the child’s suspected murderer is thought to have been a relative, furious, capitalised denunciations of the whole extended family, who will be branded as ‘SCUM, ALL OF THEM!’

What sort of people need to make ‘memorial’ pages about complete strangers?  I imagine that some of them may be serial RIP page makers and there is something about that which is in a way at least as creepy as the behaviour of the RIP trolls themselves. It’s not evil in the way that RIP trolling is evil, but by god it is creepy. It’s akin to organising a wake in your own house for someone who you had never heard of before you read about their death in the newspaper and then asking people to bring you sympathy cards when they come to pay tribute to a body that is not even there. I mean, what is all that about??

Sample quote from the maker of one such page about a deceased young girl whose disappearance and murder were all over the news: ‘This is a group set up to pay your respects to another Angel gone to [sic] soon, before anyone judges me in this instanise [sic] I do not feel I have to ask the family.’ I can’t speak for that child’s family but if I lost a member of my own and some creepy stranger seen it as an opportunity to play professional mourner on the Internet and so went and held a virtual wake for that person, well I would be fit to be tied. And even apart from the capitalised cyberlynching of whole families, many, many of the comments to be found on those sites are tasteless in the extreme - and I am not talking about those that come from trolls. Here’s another comment from that same ‘memorial’ page: ‘I didn’t know this lovely young girl but she will always be in my heart.’ No, she won’t. You lie. You’re a liar. Your ‘grief’ is just a shallow display of your own ego and your comment is getting close to being as crass and as insulting as those that emanate from the RIP trolling subculture. Pretend sorrow is much worse than no display of sorrow at all. At least the trolls don’t pretend to grieve in their attention-seeking displays. It is an insult to the intelligence of anyone for you to pretend that you have suffered a great loss. You’re a parasite. Stop being a parasite and show some real respect, which in your case could best be shown by saying nothing at all. You really are a genuine example of an actual, real, grief tourist.

I have never written on a tribute page for someone, but I did once go to sign a book of condolence that was set up for the sake of the families of people who were murdered in a bombing massacre. I didn’t know any of the people who died, nor their families, but I just wanted to tell the genuinely grieving people that other people cared about what had happened. Maybe them knowing that people cared would help them a little. I didn’t pretend that I myself had suffered a dreadful loss, it didn’t do anything for my ego, it was just a sincere human gesture. You can do these things without being crass about it. You can be moved by something and pay your respects in relation to it without indulging yourself in the spectacle of false grief.

But it does seem clear that genuine RIP pages are of a little solace to some people who have suffered real loss. In April of 2012, a troll targeted the page of a 17-year-old English girl called Amanda Slann who had died from leukaemia a couple of months before. Her family told ITN News that they and the girl’s friends had been able to gain comfort from reading the nice things which people had said about her. The troll, even though it was blocked by the page administrator, kept coming back with new profiles.