But this is the kind of ego and relationships-driven drama that takes place in the Facebook trolliverse all the time. Unlike 4Chan and its totally anonymous system, Facebook by its very nature has allowed these mentalist monstrosities to develop recognisable Internet identities and so thus has sprung up a trolling soap opera complete with all the drama, horror, and comedy that you would expect in a saga starring such total and absolute headcases. There also exists on Facebook an ongoing battle between trolls and anti-trolls, a peculiar spectacle where individuals who want to destroy each other’s real lives and reputations are interacting daily with one another on a social network. It is a cloak-and-dagger game of subterfuge and attempted real life repercussions that if nothing else keeps the trolls’ energies sometimes more focused on it and away from RIP walls.
Much of the drama between the trolls has been caused by the constantly shrieking and maniacal Paul Baloney himself, the man who many trolls blame for - and who I myself also give credit to – destroying what was once upon a time a disturbingly large trolling ring. In many ways, Baloney is the greatest anti-troll of all time and credit is due to him for starting what became known to some as the 2010 Great Facebook Troll Wars. These tore apart the main body of the Facebook RIP trolls, significantly depriving those trolls of much of their power to cause harm while also tying them up in what seemed to be an everlasting hell of endless bellowing and blubbering and doxing and counter-doxing and stupidity and spectacle. And at the centre of it all lay a leaked photograph of Paul Baloney’s comically puny pecker hanging beside a small Nokia mobile phone and proving itself of similar size to his also-in-the-picture thumb.
The photograph was posted onto Facebook by his aforementioned troll ex-girlfriend, who unsurprisingly was a little bit angry that Mr Baloney had tried to have both she and her family targeted by drug dealers in her home town of Manchester once she called it quits with him. He had got to hear about another troll having hacked the Facebook account of some jailed Manc drug dealer, who unbeknownst to him until he was contacted in jail by one of his associates had been daily ‘coming out’ as gay on his Facebook page.
Baloney saw here his opportunity and contacted on Facebook some of this dealer’s friends and gave them the names and addresses of his ex-girlfriend and her family, claiming that they were behind the hacking. He also did his familiar routine of making Facebook groups with their names and addresses in them and alleging that they were paedophiles. All of this led to his ex having to move house for her own safety.
Her revenge though in the form of the releasing of that photograph of his little pecker sounded the final toll of the bell for his already seriously questionable levels of sanity and he very quickly lost totally the last grip on both himself and on reality which he may then have had left. Any troll who publicly laughed at the photograph and mocked his wiener was soon to get caught up in the psychotic whirlwind of revenge that Baloney’s acute embarrassment unleashed and quickly sides were taken, threats were made, and dox was spilled. Baloney and his winged monkeys spent most of the rest of the year fighting online with people who had laughed at his wee dick.
And, needless to say, all of the while I and the rest of the anti-trolls were loving this. Christmas had come early in 2010 and it kept on coming. I ‘cloned’ the accounts of a few trolls, that is I made accounts in their names and featuring the profile pictures which they would normally use, and made various groups of my own to mock the now notorious pecker. These groups never lasted long as it appeared obvious that Baloney was getting his army of gimps to mass report them to Facebook with their many accounts and so ensure their speedy demise, but the damage was done and done good when he fell easily for it. Trolls getting trolled to troll other trolls, always good that. Divide and conquer.
I sometimes have felt as if I were stuck in the middle of a Coen brothers film, but even the Coens at their best could not come up with characters and scenarios as the likes of which are to be found in this trolliverse. Two main camps had sprung up. One was that of Baloney and many of the more absolutely psychotic trolls who lack totally any real sense of humour and who get off even more on trying to ruin vulnerable people’s lives and inciting violence against innocent people than on ‘mere’ RIP trolling itself, which they do partake in but which to them lacks the trill and empowerment of a concerted cyberharassment campaign against lone individuals. In Baloney, these mostly younger and angrier trolls have something of a god figure as he undeniably aspires to successfully incite murder and he obsessively day and night seeks out people online with whom he and his little orc-things can feud. Baloney had these trolls go all-out to defend the pecker, with Josh writing that the pecker ‘fucks different women every day until they can’t walk’ and is ‘a good size,’ while a clearly distraught Peter Partyvan tried the sarcasm approach by spamming every discussion on the pecker with things like ‘OH YEAH THAT’S REALLY FUNNY!! HA HA HA HA YOU SAID A MAN’S PENIS IS SMALL!! OH HA HA HA LET ME PICK MYSELF UP OFF THE FLOOR HERE!!’
The other camp came to be headed by the future-infamous Darren ‘Nimrod’ Burton, and who was one of the trolls I had cloned to fool Baloney into believing that they were carrying out a campaign of mockery against his pecker. While also a bunch of sickos who laugh every time they hear of a person they don’t know dying, many of them had revealed that they could as well find humour in more reasonable things - such as the wee willy - and many of these trolls aren’t as interested in trying to bring things off the Internet and into the physical world in the way which the other bunch are. There were other reasons too for the split, like Paul Baloney’s threats to ‘rape and destroy’ an 18-year-old English girl who was then a troll and who had incurred this cultural critic’s wrath by refusing to meet up with him for sex; along with these other trolls taking his ex-girlfriend’s side over the harassment campaign against her family. But the pecker photo was the lit match that fell into the open box of fireworks.
Of course, many of the trolls stayed on the sidelines and continued to exert their energies into trolling only, but the damage had been done. Steadily, that once giant RIP trolling ring, which at one stage could call hundreds of memorial page desecrators onto any one page or incite that same number again to harass and bully any one individual, descended almost totally into a cyber-handbagging match which dragged on for months, maybe even for over a year. Predictably, various other little groupings and gangs emerged even within the factions for various other stupid little reasons that mean everything to petty and tedious minds but which are too moronic to bother listing here. The RIP trolling from this fragmented lot still continued, but for the most part on a much smaller and much less intense scale than before as the vipers in the nest fed hungrily on each other, their endless squirming and spitting and biting being done over a cacophony of countless tales of betrayal and allegations of homosexuality all of which just began eventually to sound in my mind like a white noise. It got to a stage where for a while I couldn’t really tell one of them from another, I just gazed at it all and perceived it as something like a creature that is an abomination and out of which comes simultaneously hundreds of grunts and oinks as it constantly and without rest nor reason wrestles itself into an endless myriad of ugly and stupid shapes.
If people who have been badly affected by the actions of these vile cretins are wondering how I can make humour out of these same trolls I’d just like to explain that the only way which I and others could face it all on a constant basis exactly was to mine humour out of them. Not humour from their deeds on RIP pages, but humour from them themselves, from their follies and their idiocies, from their crazy delusions and their epic personal inanities and insanities. And, by god, they are rich pickings for anyone who wants to find humour in all of that. For one thing they hate even more than being doxed is being humiliated, becoming figures of fun. Because for a great many of them they have been figures of fun for all of their whole entire lives. Something I’d normally have great sympathy for, but not in these cases, not when they react to i
t by doing what they do.
They have lived their whole lives as either a Hunter Mello, or a Paul Baloney, or as a Sean Duffy - outcasts, clowns, victims of society - and then found on the Internet an escape from that where they could act out their dark fantasies and have power over people, where they can make the most vulnerable people they can find feel their pain. And then I and other anti-trolls came along and reminded them of what they really are, and I believe that it is because of that for which they truly hate us more than for anything else. Like Dennis Hopper’s equally-as-psychotic-as-them character in Blue Velvet, they hate to be looked at straight in the face. It causes them to scream in anger. Evil never likes to be looked at right in its eyes.
This RIP troll breed are the type of nutjobs some of whom could likely end up as serial killers in the not too distant future, or failing that, getting married to their sisters on the Jerry Springer Show. There is nothing that can be done about individuals like that. They are as much a fact of life as cancer or diarrhoea. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t laugh at them. Laughing at them is, I feel, part of the tonic. Hunter Mello, the ridiculous, hapless Hunter Mello, posted on his real Facebook profile that he was getting his friends - meaning ‘Anonymous,’ meaning Paul Baloney - to sort me out. His friends were, he said, ‘kind of like the Mafia.’ Only, as he went on to explain, even less forgiving.
So there you have it: you should take your chances with a Paulie Walnuts before taking them with a Paulie Socash.
This sort of thing, these delusions of mafia, cannot be allowed to go without severe mockery. These kinds of trolls have built up the most absurd views of themselves, from cyber Mafia dons to Swiftian satirists, and it all needs to be ridiculed out of existence. Pull away the Guy Fawkes masks that some of them like to sport and replace them with red clowns noses, because they desperately need to be reminded of just who and what they are. Many of them are so far gone and stupid that they have become dangerously deluded about their supposed powers, forgetting totally that they are not really ‘kind of like the Mafia.’
If ever you encounter an RIP troll desecrating a tribute page for a child you can just about be totally assured that in real life they are guaranteed to be seriously mentally disturbed, sad, and otherwise totally ridiculous individuals like, for example, the alcoholic, self-loathing basket case that is Colm Coss; or the friendless, epically obsessive, and reportedly very evil-smelling fantasist that is Paul Baloney. Individuals who will be taking the frustrations of their pathetic selves out on the most innocent and the most vulnerable people whom they can find in order to empower the ground zero sites that are their minds. They are individuals who will find it hard to fit in in any way in real society. They will have little if any real life friends and they will have lived lives plagued by self-torture and confusion wrought by their unfixable, hellish psyches. ‘One thing you can’t hide is when you’re crippled inside,’ sang John Lennon, and you certainly can’t hide it when you do psycho-trolling. Happy people don’t do that sort of stuff. Look right straight through the illusions of their fantasy online identities to see what is on the other side of them and take comfort knowing the pain and misery that they are in, and most likely always will be in. Miserable little worms that don’t have the balls to just kill themselves and instead choose to take it all out on the bereaved.
There is a saying that goes: ‘On the Internet, no-one knows you are a dog.’ Well that is not true here at all. For RIP trolls, you can know exactly what they are.
The sheer size of the delusions these beings have of themselves are immeasurable. After the British television news producers ITN done a couple of reports into the RIP trolling on Facebook, over 100 of the usual suspects gathered on a page created especially to threaten Chris Choi, the journalist who had done both of the reports. To them, he had no idea of what he had just messed with and now his career and even his life was in pieces. Paul Baloney even posted on it to tell him that only he could get him out of this ‘sorry mess.’ As Baloney knew that I had been involved in one of the reports I suspect that he was expecting to be able to cut a deal with Chris Choi in exchange for what he knew on me. They were genuinely convinced that they were going to ruin his career for daring to report on their squalid little world.
To give the reader another idea of how deep their sad little cybermafia fantasies have taken root in their minds, I will reproduce an utterly terrifying ultimatum that I received in 2010 from a troll calling itself ‘WeAre Legion.’ It was sent to me not long after I had returned from my short absence that followed the Oliver episode and it captures perfectly the delusions of mafia which they hold of themselves.
WeAre Legion
April 19, 2010 at 1:40pm
Subject: Your Efforts.
Dear Mr. Lonston, and all would-be troll ousters,
We have been recently been made aware that your ‘anti-trolling’ efforts have garnered some self-perceived success. Your outing of several Facebook trolls’ real identities has once again reminded us that stupidity garners rewards for those that wait. We have further been made aware that you offered a ‘peace offering’ of sorts, wherein you promised to stop outing the identities of Facebook trolls, and in exchange we would stop harassing Oliver Jackson. You stated if I am correct, ‘I never once foreseen that someone else would get the blame for my actions,’ and there it is that I must direct your attention. Indeed, you have not foreseen the consequences of your futile efforts, but it was always going to come to this. Everyone is fair game. You can out as many trolls as you wish, for any that are capable of being ousted are of no use to us. They are as disposable to us as ‘innocents’ such as Oliver Jackson.
But I digress. Our purpose here is to respond to your proposed ‘peace-offering.’ Your claim that you will stop trying to oust our ‘true’ identities if we cease to target Oliver Jackson is predicated on our belief that you will not create another account, and continue your efforts there. Frankly, whether you do so or not is of little consequence to us. Let me then state our own actions should more attempts to oust us continue: If one of us is ousted or we learn about such efforts to do so, regardless of whether or not you personally were involved, we will target an ‘innocent’ person at random, such as we have with Oliver Jackson, and ‘harass’ said person until you personally, using your current account, convince the ouster to cease their efforts (confirmation of which will only be accepted in the form of a message sent to one of us stating they will cease their efforts, much in the way you currently have).
As for coming after you personally, you think we don’t already have your information? We have no real desire to use it however, we save our serious efforts for ‘special people.’ Of course, that is subject to change pending your compliance with our terms.
You said before, ‘Others will inevitably continue to out you.’ We understand this. We expect this. We will also hold you responsible for this. You can no longer just walk away from this. You wanted to be a part of this, now you are. On our terms.
We await your response.
Post Script,
By now I suspect you are wondering who ‘we’ are. Allow me then to grace you with the knowledge of who we are: We are anonymous. Anonymous is legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget.
Expect us.
Oh the drama!
If I recall correctly I may just have wet myself after I read that, but it wasn’t through fear. I especially liked the ‘And don’t bloody think we don’t know who you are, mate. We’re just not bothered enough to say it. So there’ bit. In the event, this cyber Corleone made up a fake account by the name of Terry someone-or-other and sent me messages begging me to stop whatever it was I was doing as some terrible people were ruining his life on the Internet over it.
WeAre Legion IP-ed to the State University of New York at Buffalo (as, amusingly, did ‘Terry’). The style of WeAre Legion, though, could be said to be a straight-up carbon copy of Paulie Socash’s style, right down to the ‘But I digress’ line, a line ole Paulie is ver
y fond of using himself both in and out of his troll skin, and indeed when I Google for it along with Paulie’s real name dozens of instances of that particular individual using that line come up.
Paulie has also at another time referred to this same troll as a ‘close associate.’ It seems likely that ‘Paulie’ wrote out that message and asked his troll ‘associate’ to send it to me, perhaps believing that I would respond better to someone whose name bared part of the feared Anonymous motto. Consider this from Paulie, posted publicly on his profile the day before I received that bone-chilling ultimatum:
Paulie Socash
I am disappoint
It has come to my attention that the whole ‘problem’ of some idiot named ‘Mike Lonston’ ousting people has ended (for now) in a most unsatisfactory way. I’m not privy to the conversation as whole, and correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems a number of trolls caved to the demands of someone who really poses little or no threat. The agreement, as I understand it, is one only those who entered into it can keep for themselves (to protect themselves) and holds no real bearing on the efforts of ‘Mike Lonston,’ regardless if he deleted his former profile (you all know how easy it is to make a new one and go about as if nothing happened) OR the rest of us.
Now, I don’t care what you see as your role here, but I do think, no, KNOW, that you should distance your IRL info from what you are doing no matter what. All the ousted trolls that I saw were documented due to stupid, careless shit that involved letting slip their real info. There was no Jedi tracking you though proxies, much less hacking Facebook’s logs. While I may like working alongside you, this is stupid and unacceptable.
Hackers on Steroids Page 9