Hackers on Steroids (4 page)

The trolling reached its very depths when some of the ghouls involved started ringing up his parents to taunt them down the phone and then host the recordings of the calls online. Mitchell Henderson’s father, Mark Henderson, told the New York Times that the phone call campaign went on for a year and a half. ‘It really got to my wife,’ he said.

Someone - in an astonishing display of malevolence - even went out of their way to actually find the child’s grave and place an iPod onto it. The photograph of this was subsequently posted by the subhuman responsible onto /b/, to a reaction that we can probably well guess at.

/b/ had discovered just how black its heart could be and the many, many sociopaths who were even back then drawn to it because of its dark content and its culture of causing trouble to people outside of its borders had found the true strength of power to torment that they held as a unit. Up until then, /b/ raiders had confined themselves to attacking lone individuals whom they had found elsewhere on the Internet or to causing trouble for groups of people like the furries, a strange breed who apparently like to wear animal costumes while having sex.

But this had taken things to a whole new level. It’s not hard to picture how buoyed up a great many of these trolls were by how they had all come together as one to act in such an extremely anti-social way. I mean, if you want to engage in something like the Mitchell Henderson trolling it is quite obvious that you are severely mentally disturbed and most likely had grown up feeling that your desire to engage in excessively anti-social behaviour made you abnormal and probably you felt like you didn’t belong.  But here the psychos had found their collective self and could come together as a community in which psychotic behaviour is the norm and is rewarded by belly laughs and emulation from others in that community. Thus, some of the very worst psychopaths on the Net had begun to truly find their voices and to speak as something approaching a group.

Another notable psycho-trolling chapter took off a few months after the start of the Mitchell Henderson trolling episode when photographs of the nearly decapitated corpse of Californian girl Nikki Catsouras were brought to the attention of /b/. She was an 18 year-old-girl who in the October of 2006 took her father’s car out for a drive while she was on drugs and smashed it into a tollbooth at high speed, killing herself instantly. One of the California highway patrolmen called to the scene took photographs of the girl’s terribly disfigured body as it lay in the car and soon they were leaked onto the Internet via email, shortly after then finding their way onto /b/. The psychotics of 4Chan decided that the family of this young girl hadn’t suffered enough and so began a campaign to show her family the death photographs at every given opportunity. Myspace pages and Youtube videos containing the photos were made that mocked the girl and her manner of death and her family tormented with them by trolls who contacted them on the same sites, causing great trauma to her sorrowing relatives. Her whole family’s email addresses were dug up by trolls and the torment taken even to those private places. Countless photoshops, some of them sexual in nature, were made of the accident pictures and sent to her family under misleading subject titles. Eventually the family had to stop using the Internet altogether to escape from the torture; and they fought a lengthy and brave but ultimately futile battle to have the photographs removed from the Web.

The kind of psychopaths who took part in the Nikki Catsouras ‘trolling’ may have been of the opinion that they were punishing the young girl for what they see as her unpardonable sin in taking cocaine and then driving away in her father’s car. Or at least quite a number of them seem likely to have thought that they were delivering a righteous verdict on her behaviour by their own actions in victimising her family. A 2007 thread from /b/ on the subject of the Nikki Catsouras harassment, and which has been archived on another website, may give something of an insight into the mindset of some of the cyberpaths who were involved in harassing her family in such a way. In it, many trolls are expressing their belief that she got what she deserved for driving fast in a car which was not her own and that in death she should be afforded no dignity and should not be allowed to rest in peace because of her behaviour in the lead-up to her death.

This strange contradiction in morals is displayed by many RIP trolls, on the one hand playing social conservatives disgusted by the story of a young woman taking cocaine and then driving away in her father’s car without his permission; and then on the other hand seeming to believe that conduct which is way beyond the pale of any acceptable idea of human behaviour is a righteous judgement to inflict on her memory and on her family because of it. Of course, at its core it is just an excuse for psychotic behaviour but one that may, when it is believed by the psychotics involved in such conduct, allow them to feel superior to their victims on a moral level; and it is interesting to consider that some of them at one level do believe their own excuse-making, and I do think that some of these kinds of trolls do believe that they are carrying out righteous work, even if they’re laughing as they do it. I could state many cases in which RIP trolls have behaved similarly and the Mitchell Henderson trolling saga is one of them, where some trolls have justified their actions by claiming that they were punishing the child in death for, as they falsely claim, killing himself over a missing iPod.  The mind boggles at such a level of distorted thinking that could cause someone to view such behaviour as a moral judgement rightfully served, but many RIP trolls do use a variety of similar excuses for their actions, more of which I will come to later.

Perhaps it could all best be compared to the behaviour of the Westboro Baptist Church, the Pentateuch-influenced cult headed by the infamous sadist Fred Phelps and which has gained global notoriety for ‘protesting’ at funerals all across America. (So anti-social are they that even the Ku Klux Klan have branded them as a hate group). They claim that their disruption of funeral processions is a protest against homosexuality in the United States, even though the vast majority of people whose funerals they in essence troll weren’t gay. Soldiers are a favourite target for these real-life trolls with the reasons given by the Westboros that they died in the name of a country which tolerates gayness, and gayness to the Westboro cult is the greatest sin of all. Any excuse though will do for them, with them blaming every tragedy that befalls people in their own country on their supposed deity’s judgement on America for in general condoning homosexuality, and so therefore any funeral procession for anyone who has died from violence, accident, or disease becomes, in their eyes, fair game. I suppose that there can be little doubt that they do actually believe in some real way to be committing moral acts when they harass grieving people at a funeral procession, but it is quite clear that at the end of it all they only do what they do because they enjoy causing outrage and pain and gaining attention by being cunts. Anything else, whether they believe it in their blackened hearts or not, is just an excuse; and indeed two members of the cult were recorded by a British documentary crew as saying that even if they didn’t believe their actions to be directed by their sky-god that they would still carry on doing them and enjoying themselves as they did so anyway. It is safe to assume that they favour targeting the funerals of soldiers above all others exactly because of the level of outrage this generates among their fellow Americans. Like their cyber equivalents on 4Chan and Facebook, these trolls know precisely which buttons to press. 

Another fitting comparison could be made with the psychotic members of the so-called ‘Manson Family’ and how they murdered people in the genuinely held belief that they were doing the world a real favour in trying to start an apocalyptic race war. Susan Atkins, aka ‘Sadie Mae Glutz’ and the woman who personally stabbed to death Sharon Tate, confessed to a cell mate a plan she harboured to murder some Hollywood celebrities and then put the blame onto black people in the belief that it would help trigger what Charlie Manson termed ‘Helter Skelter,’ his version of the end-of-the-world myth contained in the Book of Revelations. Atkins was going to use a red-hot knife to carve ‘helter skelter’ into Elizabeth Taylor’s forehead before gouging out her eyes as Richard Burton, tied up alongside his wife, was forced to watch. She was then going to castrate Burton and place his penis along with Taylor’s eyes into a bottle that she would then mail on to Elizabeth Taylor’s ex-husband.

Tom Jones was also to have the Atkins treatment done on him. ‘Sadie Mae’ would at knife point force Jones into having sex with her and at the moment of his climax she would slit his throat. Frank Sinatra was to be hung upside down in his own house by Atkins and other members of Manson’s gang and then skinned alive, with purses being made from his skin that Atkins wanted to then sell to hippy shops.

Now, there can be absolutely no doubt at all that Susan Atkins truly believed in the conscious part of her unspeakably dysfunctional mind that what she was planning to do - and that what she had already been involved in doing to Sharon Tate and others - was for some sort of higher purpose (she believed Charlie to be none other than Jesus Christ come back), but it is also blatantly obvious that it all was at its core just an excuse for her to let her subhuman side run away with itself and live out its gruesome fantasies. Just as Charlie Manson could only give the lost and hopeless creations that came to him an illusion of a higher mission to go along with their already existing depravities, and Fred Phelps can only give the pathetic (mostly familial) adherents to his cult perverse moral justifications for their own sadism, the RIP trolling subculture only offers some sort of equally insane and equally false excuses for already crazed and evil individuals. The concept of ‘Helter Skelter’ as a reason to skin Frank Sinatra alive is no saner to my eyes than the concept of teaching some poor deceased kids right from wrong by torturing their families about their deaths. Yet just as there is no doubt at all that while the Manson Family did believe their own insane reasons as to why their psychotic behaviour was justified, there can too be little doubt that a great many of those trolls who claim moral justifications for their own demented and psychotic Internet behaviours do actually believe them - even when they are really just using them to indulge their evil urges. The fact that they actually expect people to accept that there are real ethical reasons as to why they are sending some poor set of parents’ pictures of their bloodied daughter lying dead shows how far gone into the blackest pit of madness which they have went. 

Of course, many trolls just outright state that they do it ‘for the lulz’ and for the lulz only. No social or moral pretensions there. Lulz, if you didn’t know, is LOLing at others misfortunes, or even adding to them - a more extreme and interactive form of schadenfreude. ‘I done it for the lulz,’ is a popular meme on 4Chan and beyond.

By 2007, RIP trolling on /b/ was really coming along. A read through the pages of Encyclopedia Dramatica, a wiki site (that is an online user-generated encyclopaedia) dedicated to collecting 4Chan lore, shows a wide range of dead youngsters of all ages who in that year became - or rather their families and friends became - the target of spite from the trolls at /b/. If 2006 was the genesis of mass RIP trolling on the Web, then 2007 was the year when it truly became established as its own Internet subculture, with trolling raids by 4Chan on online memorial pages becoming commonplace. It has only grown and spread since then. RIP trolling itself has become a 4Chan-inspired meme.

When in 2006 I first came across Sean Duffy, or ‘Truth’ as he was known only to me then, he was trying to shock users on various forums and on Youtube by writing sick comments about children who had died in circumstances that had been widely covered for years by media in Britain, such as the 1996 Dunblane gun massacre in Scotland of 16 primary schoolchildren and their teacher; or about Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, two 10-year-old English girls murdered by a paedophile school caretaker in 2002. But from about 2007 or ‘08 onwards some of his trolling was about young Americans whose deaths would not have been covered by British media but who did become the focus of trolling on 4Chan. One name that I can clearly recall and which also appears on Encyclopedia Dramatica is that of Anna Svidersky, 17 and from Washington state and whose online memorial book he desecrated with sexual slurs almost daily for weeks.

He also trolled obsessively on both Youtube and Myspace about the suicide of 13-year-old Hannah Bond, and about the murder of 20-year-old Sophie Lancaster, both from England but both also featured on Encyclopedia Dramatica. He had joined the heavily-trolled Megan Moore RIP page with his real profile in order to say how disgusted he was by the trolling. It was common for him to appear as himself on places he had trolled, and so extremely likely that he trolled the Megan Moore page with a trolling alt. While it was a target for the main body of Facebook-based trolls, it was also a target for 4Chan - the link to the page having been posted onto /b/ - and Sean Duffy was never known by me to have had any links whatsoever with the main ring of Facebook-based trolls (apart from trolling some of the same RIP walls as them he never seemed to join their web). In 2010 he joined, again with his real-name Facebook account, a page for murdered 15-year-old Welsh girl Rebecca Aylward. It was being trolled by /b/ and only by /b/.