But most of what appears on /b/ is total and absolute bollocks. And some of the stuff again is really, really vile. By far the most popular of the 4Chan boards, other boards ranging from places to swap cartoon art of Japanese girls being penetrated by tentacles to a board to go and discuss science and mathematics, /b/ sees millions of visitors per month. Many of its users, who refer to themselves as ‘/b/tards,’ seem to think of themselves as belonging to some edgy and dangerous underground movement, which is unspeakably tragic, really. Some of the sad little fantasists who live full-time on the board even like to try and harass journalists who write in either positive or negative terms about the place, this to keep up with that deluded and wretched fantasy-play that /b/ is a secret underworld place governed by Omertà and which should be spoken of only by the elite (that is, friendless little psychopaths who masturbate over cartoon tentacle porn). Or maybe they’re just scared that their mammys will get to read about it and stop them hanging out there. These types of trolls are fond of accusing people of taking the Net too seriously but they take themselves and their grubby little online base more seriously than they will ever have the mental capacity to realise.
There exists on it also a tediously adolescent culture that is all about trying to shock, whether that be with gruesome pictures of corpses of people who have died in some kind of violent way (quite common on the board); to all sorts of porn: from men and women covered in excrement (again, quite common on /b/), to extreme kinds of violent torture porn featuring, for instance, women having their mouths ripped wide open as far as they can go and with a penis being pushed in as far as it will go (very common on /b/).
If Beavis and Butthead had a favourite place to go on the Internet it would be /b/, although it would probably be erroneous to believe that the majority of those users of the board who post and get off on that kind of material are teenage boys as one might expect given the level of the ‘humour’ displayed. It is impossible to know for sure given the completely anonymous nature of the site, but in my experience most trolls to be found elsewhere on the Internet but who subscribe to 4Chan culture are well into their 20s, with many of them again in their 30s, and some even in their 40s (one Facebook RIP troll was rumoured to be well into his 60s). Age is no real pointer of maturity in the world of those trolls and I find no reason to believe that the situation is any different on 4Chan than it is on Facebook. Nor should it be assumed that all those immersed in 4Chan culture are male as females make up a small but significant percentage of the 4Chan-inspired trolls of Facebook. Saying all of that though, teenage boys do make up a very significant number of the Facebook troll population; although it is my finding that they are not in the majority.
There also appears quite frequently on /b/ so-called ‘softcore’ child porn pics that are of prepubescent girls or boys wearing almost nothing and posing in ways obviously designed to turn a paedophile on. It is not unknown, too, for extreme child pornography images of children being sexually abused to appear. Just about one of the only rules on /b/ is ‘no cp,’ cp being Internet shorthand for child pornography, but still it appears.
Whenever someone begins a topic on /b/ the popularity of it decides how long it stays up, as the board uses a ‘survival of the fittest’ system that sees posts drop off into oblivion soon after people have stopped replying to them. (4Chan has no archives and once a thread is gone, it is gone from 4Chan for good, although some of the most popular threads will sometimes be archived by other sites). Almost inevitably, it is the topics that contain the most shocking or controversial content which get the most attention most of the time. In 2011, for instance, I reported to the US police a thread on /b/ that started off with a picture of a girl of about nine in a bikini and who was being made to pose ‘provocatively’ and below that text from a man claiming to be a paedophile and who said he was close to abusing his first child and claiming that he wanted to be stopped. There were about 200 replies on that thread, some from others who were also claiming to be paedophiles and who were going into great detail on how to groom a child for sexual exploitation; to many others who were telling him not to do it; along with a host of other replies again from trolls who were telling him to go ahead, apparently because they found the idea of a child being potentially sexually abused to be funny.
Mostly though, /b/ is just random and mainly harmless nonsense and crap, and indeed the full title of the board is ‘/b/ - Random.’ Although a check as of the time of writing, 11.47am GMT on Sunday 24th June 2012, finds on the third page, after some of the usual nonsense pics, inside jokes, and cartoon porn, a thread started by a user who has written ‘CP Thread anyone?’ and posted a photograph of what appears to be a girl of about 13 being sexually molested with a vibrator. Below it another user has posted ‘Disgusting, reported.’ Below that again someone has posted a picture of a man actually excreting onto a squealing baby, along with the text, ‘look at this horny mother fucker.’ Under that are a few other comments from different users, some lauding the posters of the cp and one saying ‘gross,’ and then a stream of pictures below those comments where other /b/tards have posted photos of dead babies in various states of decay, along with a post which again has that photograph of a man excreting onto a baby. In the 4th post from the bottom, someone has put up what appears to be a photograph of a little girl being tortured by a paedophile. In it, a girl of around 10 who is naked from the waist down is being held up with a rope around her neck by a man whose face cannot be seen. The individual who has posted this has written beside the image: ‘that little slut loves to get strangled’.
Just a random look on this hugely popular and much discussed board has brought that up. I report this to the Internet Watch Foundation, a UK-based charity that reports illegal content online directly to the police. Then I close down the tab on my browser that I had accessed 4Chan from, fucking glad to be away from it. That, folks, is the wild and wacky 4Chan in all its glory.
It was in this digital dungeon that in 2006 were sown the seeds which grew into the bitter harvest that is the wider RIP trolling subculture of today, and it was the family and friends of Mitchell Henderson, a 13-year-old boy from Minnesota who in the April of 2006 took a rifle and shot himself dead with it, who were the first targets of 4Chan’s most morbid and black-hearted contribution to the world.
Why Mitchell Henderson killed himself is not known to the Internet. Some reports do say that he was a troubled kid and talk of bullying being suffered by him. A few months after his death, someone posted onto /b/ a link leading to a Myspace memorial page for him that his friends had set up. Almost obsolete now, Myspace is a social networking site along the same lines as Facebook and that allows people to share comments and photographs and such with each other. Mitchell’s friends had turned their page into a virtual shrine for him and among the comments, prayers, and pictures they were leaving in memory of the child one young friend had written on it to tell the dead boy that he had found his lost iPod. The /b/tards picked up on this and so was birthed the enduring Internet myth that Mitchell Henderson committed suicide over a lost iPod. This is established 4Chan and RIP trolling lore now and this invention can be found on countless troll-made pages dotted around the Internet.
Another of Mitchell’s friends had written that he was ‘an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind.’ The comment itself can be read as nothing but heartfelt but for /b/ there was something fall-over-funny about the comment - and especially the grammatical error contained therein - and so was born the ‘an hero’ meme, something that is widely used by trolls now to refer to people who have committed suicide. Whenever trolls come calling on a tribute page made about someone who has taken their own life, the meme won’t be too far behind. How this phrase has spread throughout the general RIP trolling populace and gained the level of popularity that it has says a lot about their level of wit.
For many of the less-than-human morons on /b/ this whole thing was something all too beautiful and they began harassing the young kids on Mitchell H
enderson’s tribute page, eventually even going on to making something of a game out of harassing his family about his death. For some, I imagine it was and shall remain the very highlight of their entire lives. It is hard to understand as to just why they took such a delight in this one particular tragedy, but delight in it they did and soon it became a competition among them to see who could cause the most hurt to the boy’s family and friends. Whole hordes of them began trolling about his death - it had quickly turned into a free-for-all for the most malign users of /b/. One of the trolls hacked into his personal Myspace account and defaced the pictures of him on it; others still made fake Myspace pages in his name that featured other gruesomely doctored images of the deceased child. Some made videos mockingly re-enacting his suicide; and so it went on and on with /b/ and other places filling up with an endless parade of pictures and videos featuring his face beside iPods or in pornographic scenes. It is likely that many hundreds joined in on this, with many, many more showing their approval. The blueprint for the future RIP trolling scene had just been drawn up.
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.
Hackers on Steroids Page 4