Hackers on Steroids (2 page)

I’m not saying that fake accounts on Facebook are evil in themselves; indeed during my voyage down through the abyss I created and used a large number of them myself, but the ease with which they can be made and how they are being abused by extremely evil individuals is the very root of the problem. A whole culture has grown up on the Internet that is dedicated to seeking out tragedy and making it worse by harassing the families and friends of deceased people with visual and textual manifestations of the most base evil, vomited forth from the cancerous psyches of the sewer-things who practise this crime against all common decency. This is RIP trolling, widely covered by the media in the previous few years and to be found in its most abundant on Facebook. It is, without doubt to my mind, one of the most ghoulish and purely evil practises that the Internet has given us, and something which torments its vulnerable victims long after the computer has been switched off. These RIP trolls will go through fake account after fake account - many in the names of dead children - in their pursuit of torment, easily making another account within minutes after their previous one has been banned.

This same ritual of new account after new account is used also by the massive web of paedophiles who have adopted Facebook to quite openly socially network with each other, swapping an endless chasm of child sex abuse images and giving each other encouragement and advice on making new such images of their own. From mothers willing to sexually abuse their children with dogs for the pleasure of other paedophiles on the site; or men posting images of themselves molesting babies in real-time and all the while being egged on by the enthusiastic howling of their fellow demonic creatures, fake account after fake account comes and goes with endless monotony day and night, with one paedophile having his account banned one minute and being able to spring right back up again with another a minute later.

I know all of this because after I found Sean Duffy I managed to get onto his genuine Facebook account by making my first fake profile on that system. Posing as a girl, I fooled him into letting me onto his personal profile and in November 2009 I saw that he had joined a Facebook page called ’Rest in Peace Megan Moore.’ When I clicked on the link I discovered what could have been up to 150 different individuals persecuting the friends of Megan Moore, a 16-year-old English girl who had only the day before died after tripping and then falling under a train. They were all doing what I had up until then beheld being done only by one socially stunted lunatic from Reading.

Sean Duffy had become to me the key that unlocked the doors down into Hell.

With the development of the Internet...we are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. I used to think that it was just the biggest thing since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back farther.
  

John Perry Barlow

The Internet truly has changed our world. Unlike ‘the band that changed the world,’ or ‘the film that changed the world,’ the Web really has profoundly affected the way in which we live our lives and is without doubt the most important invention of the late 20th century.

This wondrous technology, this dream of early science-fiction writers. Even as a kid growing up and with the popular explosion of the World Wide Web just around the corner, I could not have conceived of something so utterly amazing. We take it for granted now and treat it just like another everyday thing, but really, when you think about it, the Internet is mind-blowing, the thread that binds conceivably everyone on planet Earth together. It is the very apex of communicatory evolution. The thoughts we think, the images we see, the sounds we hear can all make their way across the globe in seconds to any willing recipient, to one or to many, and can stay on public view perhaps forever. Who needs crappy old telepathy when you’ve got a Net connection?

The Internet has laid our world bare before us. On the Web we all live in the same strange village, a place where you are always living next door to everyone else who lives there too. To be able to send and receive music and videos in the way in which the Net allows is something that those of us who grew up without any conception of anything like the Internet could never have dreamed of. Whole universes of previously hard or impossible-to-find music, film, and television are now freely available to us all. It also serves as the ultimate encyclopaedia and as the ultimate handbook for everything. It is
the
great breakthrough for free expression and it has opened up doors for us all. The social changes it is bringing about cannot be underestimated. Free speech and free ideas run through the Web like its lifeblood. From giving every struggling musician and amateur filmmaker an instant platform and a potential mass audience, to changing the ways shopping and trade are done, to actually inspiring and coordinating real-world revolutions that bring down real-world dictatorships, the Internet is fast becoming the very heartbeat of human existence.

The 2011 Egyptian revolution that overthrew three decades of dictator Hosni Mubarak’s rule had, locally, the kindling of its almighty fire online. Video blogging and Facebook groups were instrumental in inciting and organising the mass protests that saw him thrown out of power. Indeed, during the revolution his government shut down Internet access in most of Egypt in a vain attempt to put the genie back in the bottle. This tool most of us only play with has immense power and it is only really beginning to be truly realised by the world as to just what effects that power can cause. There can be little doubt about it - the Web is going to help shape the future of our world in many major ways. Online activism can carry serious power within it and this has now been proven beyond all doubt. Because of the Internet we are now entering a new age where all that was previously known only by some can now become known by all, and all which wants to be said can be heard. No matter how hard some governments in the world may try, knowledge is beginning to truly know no borders and it is all because of the World Wide Web. The Net is going to help free the earth in many ways, in the East and in the West.

But all of this has its dark and nasty side, too. Just as the technology itself stands as a testament to man’s genius for invention, and how it is sometimes used a testament to his creativity and to the force of free ideas, the basically anonymous nature of the Web also allows each one of us if we so desire to don the masks of monsters and become online what lies in the hearts of many evil characters just waiting to be given free expression. Whereas in a former age many of those who so may have desired to bully and harass and abuse vulnerable people may have, perhaps by reasons of themselves being weak and seriously socially inept or perhaps because of other circumstances, been stunted in their yearning to cause pain and torture, they have now before them an endless virtual playground where they can act out their dark fantasies and even assume the power of life and death over real and innocent people, and all of this with almost absolute impunity.

Online, people can run wild and become as savage as they so desire, and some very often do. Plato gives us the story of the Ring of Gyges that grants to its wearer the power of invisibility. In it, the humble shepherd Gyges discovers a magical golden ring of invisibility and, shedding all moral inhibition, abuses his newfound powers to murder the king of his land and take the crown for himself. The cloak of invisibility that the Internet affords us has brought about an online world where we are freed from the normal accountability to our fellow man which society demands of us and with our invisibility we can become in a way who and what we want to be. It is that lack of accountability which allows us to act up online in a manner which might not prove to be too good for our health if carried on into the real world! Internet Disinhibition Effect as it is known is why many of us, myself included, who have used anonymous interactive forums in order to communicate with random strangers act or have acted like pricks at some time or another. When the societal fears that – whether we like to believe it or not – do govern us all are then taken away from us and we no longer have to fear the law, or retributive violence, or social exclusion, or embarrassment, then the temptation to act up can often prove too much. But for the most part this is not something that goes too far. There are those who will use their rings of invisibility to taunt and mock people in, say, rival political or tribal camps or those who support sports teams other than their own. At the end of the day, all of this kind of thing is relatively harmless banter and most of those who take it are also giving it back in spades. It’s just a form of playtime for adults who should know better.

The world, though, also contains the psychopaths for whom there is no such thing as ‘going too far’ and for whom the Web is an instrument with which to inflict true torture. For some of them, almost their entire online existence is dedicated to searching out the families and friends of children who have died tragically and bombarding them with grotesque doctored ‘photoshop’ images of their dead loved ones along with sadistic comments mocking those people’s deaths. These same entities will involve themselves in other types of psycho-trolling as well, like pretending to be missing persons in order to forlornly get a family’s hopes up; to sexual harassment of children, or mothers regarding their children; to even going so far as trying to incite murder against innocent people by conducting campaigns that falsely label them as paedophiles or by making up fake Internet profiles of them and doing all of their trolling from those ‘cloned’ profiles. For these kinds of Web users, the rings of invisibility they wear are the tools by which they have run riot online, unleashing real hell into innocent people’s lives.

And so we return to the tale of the RIP trolls and the obscene sight that I witnessed in the friends of young Megan Moore being harassed and traumatised in what was really an organised and systematic way.

I was finding it hard to believe that all of this was really taking place. I thought that I was witnessing the behaviour of some sort of insane necro-cult which venerated the misery and trauma caused to those suffering over the death of a loved one, and, basically, that was what I was witnessing.

This crowd - and there were dozens and dozens of them, many seemingly familiar to each other - were torturing the friends of Megan Moore by desecrating her memory on a page that had been set up by some of her pals, the innocent intention of which was to allow them to all share in their collective grief at her sudden and shocking passing.  What are called ‘RIP pages’ or ‘memorial pages’ have become a commonplace sight on the Internet, most of them being made by the young.

But these creatures, almost all of whom were using obviously fake names and who were identifying themselves as RIP trolls specifically, were filling the page with hundreds of posts detailing their necrophiliac thoughts, or with songs and rhymes celebrating the girl’s death. Dozens of photoshopped pictures had been posted with Megan Moore’s image contained in them. Most of these images were gory representations of her death, while some of them were pornographic.

Witnessing this had a seriously disturbing effect on me as I hitherto had believed Sean Duffy to be something of an exclusive breed all on its own. This, though, this had taken the whole thing to an entirely new level. By visiting the profiles of the trolls I could see that they were all networking with each other to advise one another of various other memorial pages which they had found elsewhere on Facebook, of other sorrowing people ripe for harassment from them. It was clear that a whole culture had been built up around this heartlessness as they even seemed to have their own special words and expressions. They appeared to come from all over the world, from America to Australia; from Canada, Ireland, the UK, and more; and all were revelling in the horror and distress that they could collectively bring to those suffering from the death of a friend or a loved one.

I remember that for days I studied this nightmare on Facebook, horrified, hating. ‘A subculture for subhumans’ is how I described it then to myself, and what chilled me the most about it was how openly and quite without any worry of sanction from law enforcement they operated, as if the whole thing was normal behaviour to them. Quite obviously, this thing had been going on for some time.

I had discovered what was then the main gang of Facebook RIP trolls, a number of whom were to later become notorious after having their real identities revealed to the wider world by either police action or through television and newspaper exposés. That same ‘family’ of trolls, although having members added and subtracted to it all the time, would in 2010 make the news on television or in the printed media almost every week in either North America, Australia, or the UK for their nasty little appetite for preying on the bereaved.

I would estimate that the number of RIP trolls in that one grouping then numbered around 300 (with maybe around half that number again of groupies and fans, those who hang out with RIP trolls but do not engage in memorial page attacks), going on to reach maybe close to 500 at its peak in mid-2010 before it imploded in on itself amid some very amusing infighting between the drooling morons and swivel-eyed psychopaths which made up its numbers. Now scattered to the four winds, the diehard survivors all in tiny little bickering factions it was nevertheless just one passing manifestation of what is a wider Internet cult aimed at desecrating the memories of dead kids and causing as much hurt to their families and outrage amongst wider society as possible. It is an important subject as I estimate that thousands of families have been targeted in this way. In total, easily thousands are involved in this kind of thing at any one time on both Facebook and on the wider Internet. I personally have easily witnessed what must be well over one thousand instances of RIP trolling on Facebook alone, and the damage it does to people already feeling the pain of losing a child has been well-documented in the media.

These RIP trolls band together under recognised pseudonyms and find and suggest RIP pages or other groups to hit. They will scour the news to find tragedies and then look for memorial pages in relation to those deaths. If they can’t find one, many times they’ll make their own to draw unsuspecting people in, with the reverberations of this oftentimes carrying as far as the families of the deceased targets. Sometimes they will branch out and hit pages that seek help for seriously ill children, or support groups for mothers who have lost babies. At times they will even organise to flood children’s websites with bestiality and hardcore straight and gay pornography. The same psychotics also delight in finding vulnerable people to conduct sustained bullying campaigns against, bullying campaigns that can sometimes go on for years. It is a ‘no limits’ cult that has the temple of its lore on the utterly witless abomination of a website which is Encyclopedia Dramatica, and its roots in the free-for-all ‘/b/’ or ‘Random’ board of the user-generated website 4Chan.org. This is a board that some in the media like to talk up as some radical and free-spirited humour page but which in reality is - for the most part - nothing more than a haven for clueless kids, unfunny cretins, violent psychopaths, and salivating paedophiles. It truly is the cancer spreading to the rest of the Internet.

RIP trolls are as banal, stupid, ridiculous, mad, bad, sociopathic, and miserable as you would expect. I have looked deep into the black pit that is their collective and it will come as no surprise to the reader to learn that they are, in stark contrast to their brilliantly deluded view of themselves as savvy underworld masterminds, a ‘community’ which as a general rule attracts into its ranks only the most base of individuals: chronic alcoholics and drug addicts; racist street thugs with subnormal intelligence; deeply depressed, dead-eyed college students with zero social skills and disturbing obsessions; paedophiles and other makes of depraved perverts; low-level criminals of the most pathetic kind, along with other lowlife flotsam and jetsam who are to be found floating on the Internet’s high seas. Many are narcissistic. All could be said to be misanthropic. They are the excrement in the toilet of life and for a while I and some online acquaintances tried to act as the flush handle on that same toilet.