Authors: Jamie Bartlett
With so many potential targets, flaming and trolling began to spread, and became increasingly sophisticated. Several groups dedicated to trolling were set up in
alt.*
In 1999, one user called ‘Cappy Hamper’ listed in the group alt.trolls six different types of trolls: the ‘straight-up asshole flame troll’ (‘easy!’ explained Cappy Hamper, ‘Post in alt.skinheads with the header: “you buncha racist asswipers eat dog crap bisquits!”’); the ‘clueless newbie joke troll’; the ‘hit, run and watch troll’; the ‘confidence’ or ‘tactical troll’; the ‘creative cross-post troll’; and the ‘gang troll’.
The Meowers were infamous gang trolls. In 1997 a group of Harvard students had joined an abandoned Usenet group called alt.fan.karl-malden.nose to post updates about comings and goings on campus. They then started to mildly flame other Usenet groups, in order, wrote one, ‘to rile up the stupid people’. Matt
Bruce, one of the Harvard group, suggested targeting alt.tv.beavis-n-butthead. Users of alt.tv.beavis-n-butthead didn’t take kindly to these arrogant students, and started to post back to alt.fan.karl-malden.nose. So did people from other Usenet groups. So much so that the Harvard students abandoned the group, and the Beavis and Butthead invaders took it over, renaming themselves ‘the Meowers’, in mock deference to a Harvard student who, because his initials were C.A.T., signed off his messages with ‘meow’. The Meowers began setting up other Usenet groups (including alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk, alt.non.sequitur and alt.stupidity), from which they started to invade other groups by posting ridiculous, Monty Pythonesque posts, preventing anyone else from posting or entering into a discussion. This technique, now known as ‘crap-flooding’, is still very popular among trolls. In 1997–8 the Meowers went on a crap-flooding spree, targeting groups across Usenet with what they called their ‘Usenet performance art’. Meowers would also spam individuals who fought back, using anonymous remailers to disguise the address of the sender. The college email system at Boston University was broken by a Meower spam-flood. The campaign lasted for at least two years.
The trolling collective alt.syntax.tactical specialised in the ‘cross-post’ troll. Members would take a genuine post (from a group like alt.smokers, for example) and forward it via an anonymous remailer, with the original email address intact, to a group who, they believed, would not respond kindly (alt.support.non-smokers), sparking an argument between two groups who had no idea that they were, in effect, trolling each other. Alt.syntax.tactical attacks were carefully planned and
often involved plants, dummies and double agents. Trolls like alt.syntax.tactical weren’t out for quick wins, but to provoke as large and aggressive a reaction as possible. This is, they argued, what separated the trolls from the flames. A flame was typically just a deluge of insults. Although there was some overlap between the two, a troll was considered to be more careful, subtle and imaginative: ‘A troll will hold back, understanding the value of a bigger spank,’ wrote one anonymous poster to the group alt.troll. And the bigger the ‘spank’ the better:
Anyone can walk into rec.sport.baseball and say ‘baseball sucks’. It takes unbelievable skill and discipline to cause a PROLONGED flame war. That is what we do. But it can only be done with talent, and numbers to match that talent. We only bring into the fold people who have the knack to use smarts to incite chaos.
Alt.syntax.tactical were explicit in their goals:
* Our names to appear in kill files
* Regulars/Legit people abandon invaded newsgroup
* Receive much hate mail
As trolling spread, so did its reputation. It was at this time that the industry standard response emerged: ‘Don’t feed the trolls!’ A line that spurred many trolls on to increasingly extreme and shocking behaviour.
In the late 1990s, trolling took a leap towards the gutter. Trolls of the era had an informal but widely accepted code of conduct: ‘Trolling is matching wits . . .’ wrote one anonymous user in alt.trolls in 1999:
The contest must be confined to the ‘level playing field’ of Usenet. What someone posts on Usenet is fair game. But real life investigations into what someone posting with their real name does in real life by someone not using their real name (or a common and virtually untraceable one) shouldn’t strike anyone as fair.
But the distinction between digital and real was becoming increasingly vague for newer users. Two long-running, infamous episodes put paid to the ‘real-life’ limits. A small disagreement in alt.gossip.celebrities between two posters, Maryanne Kehoe and Jeff Boyd, quickly degenerated into an argument. Kehoe believed that Boyd was spamming the group with pointless messages, and emailed his employers asking for action to be taken against him. The vicious troll, it turned out, was a sensible computer programmer, and had recently become a father. In possibly the longest case of trolling in the history of the net, the games developer Derek Smart was insulted repeatedly about his (admittedly disappointing) 1996 game
Battlecruiser 3000AD
. ‘They were your run-of-the-mill anti-social misfits. And when they run into people like me – who doesn’t take crap from anyone – well, then everyone cried foul,’ Smart told me, via email. Arguments in Usenet groups when the game was released spread across the internet and just kept ratcheting up, partly because
Smart kept counter-trolling. ‘Back in the day,’ he confessed, ‘I let this sort of thing get to me.’ By 2000, most of the comments concerned Smart’s personal life and professional credentials, and most were allegedly posted by a man named Bill Huffman, a ‘self-proclaimed Derekologist’, and the manager of a California software company. Smart was also stalked by a sixteen-year-old, who claimed to own a gun. Smart applied for restraining orders and filed complaints with a confused police force. The final dispute – concerning a website Huffman had set up – was only settled in 2013.
This niche online world was being subsumed by the newcomers: Usenet codes of conduct about trolling were increasingly meaningless. It was about to get a lot worse.
By the late nineties some feared that Usenet would be ruined by trolling. In the end, innovation killed it off. The internet was becoming more accessible and the speed of downloading (and more importantly, uploading) was slashed, enabling users to post more content online, including pictures and videos. Usenet, like most new and exciting technologies, had become outdated.
At the turn of the millennium, trolls migrated from Usenet to a new breed of irreverent, user-driven, censorship-free sites, that were soon collectively labelled as ‘Not Safe For Work’ (NSFW), and often created by students or teenagers:
SomethingAwful.com
,
Fark.com
and
Slashdot.com
. Unlike traditional media, these sites were filled with stories, links, suggestions and comments from their readers. Whatever
stories were the most read or shared by users would rise up the ranking system, meaning popularity was driven not by centralised editorial control but by whatever happened to capture the attention of the community. This created – as with many content-driven sectors online – a natural incentive to be outrageous. Stories that were offensive, rude or bizarre were usually the most popular. Fark had one million unique visitors in its fourth year of existence
fn4
: a decent slice of the internet pie in 2000, when only 360 million people in the whole world were online.
The denizens of these new sites adopted and extended the philosophy of their trolling predecessors: abhorrence of censorship – which was thought of as archaic and analogue – and the idea that nothing online was to be taken seriously. The humour – which still characterises a lot of internet culture – was abstract, self-referential and irreverent.
Trolls pressed offensiveness into the service of this ideology, often in creatively disgusting ways. Goatse is short for ‘goat-sex’. It is also the name of a website set up in 1999. (I don’t advise that you search for it.) The home page features a photograph of a naked middle-aged man stretching open his anus. Trolls used the website for ‘bait-and-switch’ pranks: the posting or sending of harmless looking links that actually direct clickers to the Goatse website. This is also known as ‘shock trolling’. In 2000, Goatse links were repeatedly posted on Oprah Winfrey’s ‘Soul Stories’ chat board, with misleading accompanying messages: ‘I’ve been feeling so down lately, here’s a link to a poem I’ve written.’ There was an exodus of offended Oprah fans, and at one point the whole board was shut down. The SomethingAwful users
behind the prank celebrated this strike against the earnestness that seemed to be spreading across the internet.
fn5
The Gay Nigger Association of America (GNAA) was created in 2002, and typified this sort of extreme trolling. Their opening page featured the following invitation: ‘Are you GAY? Are you a NIGGER? Are you a GAY NIGGER? If you answered “Yes” to all of the above questions, then GNAA might be exactly what you’re looking for!’ The creators of GNAA were reportedly highly skilled programmers,
fn6
and dedicated an enormous amount of time to creating and disseminating extremely offensive material, with the aim of upsetting bloggers, celebrities, popular websites and anyone else the group took against. It would often ‘crap-flood’ sites – filling chat functions with nonsense, just as the Meowers had done a decade earlier – and hack other popular websites to alter them. GNAA described their purpose as ‘sowing disruption on the internet’ but eventually set up an internet security organisation, hacking into sites to demonstrate how susceptible to attack they were. They called it Goatse Security – ‘exposing gaping holes’ – and while members of the group have been investigated by the FBI for various hacking offences, Goatse Security has also identified and fixed a number of security flaws in major internet products and software. Zack was an early admirer of GNAA and Goatse. ‘People were just so ready to be offended by things like Goatse,’ he tells me. ‘It’s fun to upset someone who is so ready to be offended. And when they get upset, they prove you’re right. It’s circular.’
In some ways Zack, GNAA and other NSFW trolls felt it was ‘their’ internet that was being invaded by marketers, celebrities, big business, the authorities and legions of ordinary people, in the same way Usenetters felt inundated in 1993. People outside of the tribe, and all of them taking everything so
seriously
. Out of this milieu came Christopher Poole, a fourteen-year-old fan of SomethingAwful, who had found a Japanese image-sharing website called Futaba that allowed users to post about anything, anonymously. NSFW sites were exciting and bold – but participants were often identifiable, and sites were frequently moderated. The anonymous Futaba users were wildly creative, highly offensive and uncontrollable. The website was notorious in Japan for gory fiction about students slaughtering teachers, anime porn, and much besides, causing general moral outrage. Futaba’s web address was
www.2chan.net
, in tribute to the similarly outrageous website 2channel, so when Poole decided to set up an English-language equivalent in 2003, he called it 4chan: ‘its [sic]
TWO TIMES THE CHAN
MOTHERFUCK!’ he posted under the pseudonym ‘moot’.
Zack joined immediately: ‘We were trying to carve out our own space, our own part of the internet.’ The quasi-enforced anonymity made /b/ a natural home for trolls. Trolling in /b/ is widespread and extremely varied, with dozens of different trolling categories. The hacktivist collective Anonymous were almost all committed /b/tards, and used the site to plan and coordinate their ‘operations’. The group’s first major action was called Project Chanology, directed against the Church of Scientology after the Church tried to remove embarrassing
videos of Tom Cruise from the net. Although the message was a genuine one – about censorship and transparency – alongside the serious demonstrations and computer hacks were endless prank phone calls to the Scientology hotline, 4chan-inspired placards and hundreds of black faxes.
fn7
Enforced anonymity, the competitive urge to outdo your fellow users and a determination to push offensiveness in the name of a vague anti-censorship ideology are all wrapped up in a/b/trolling catchphrase: ‘I did it for the lulz’ – a phrase employed to justify anything and everything where the chief motivation is to generate a laugh at someone else’s expense. The problem, as Zack explains, is that ‘lulz’ are a bit like a drug: you need a bigger and bigger hit to keep the feeling going. Trolling can quickly spiral out of control. The popular social networking and news-sharing site Reddit once hosted a group called Game of Trolls. Its rules were simple: if you successfully upset someone on Reddit without them realising they were being trolled, you won a point. If you were identified as a troll, you lost a point. The highest scorers were listed on a leaderboard. One user visited a popular subreddit and posted an invented story about the problems he was having with a co-worker. The same user then replied as the co-worker in question, demanding an apology, and explaining that he had difficulty making friends. Redditors believed the story, and some even offered to send flowers to the abused colleague. The group had been successfully trolled. ‘It was glorious,’ recalled a witness. Game of Trolls was eventually banned by Reddit; a highly unusual step for the otherwise liberal
site, but testament to the pervasiveness and persistence of the Reddit trolls.
The competition to insult and offend, by any means necessary, can often lead to shocking extremes. In 2006 Mitchell Henderson, a fifteen-year-old from Minnesota, committed suicide by shooting himself with his parents’ rifle. Mitchell’s classmates created a virtual memorial for him on MySpace and wrote a short eulogy, which included repeated references to Mitchell as ‘an hero’: ‘he was an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back.’ The combination of a grammatical error with the contention that committing suicide was a ‘heroic’ act caused great hilarity on 4chan. After learning that Mitchell had lost an iPod shortly before killing himself, the /b/tards created photoshopped images of Mitchell and his lost device. One even took a photo of an iPod on Mitchell’s grave, and sent it to his bereaved parents. For almost two years after his death, they received anonymous phone calls from people claiming to have found Mitchell’s iPod.