Hackers on Steroids

by Oisín Sweeney

  Then there are these four cases – out of a selection of similar ones - that in my opinion just make something of a mockery of the argument in favour of jailing trolls at all, while also making it quite a bit harder to laugh at those coming out with dire warnings about the end of free speech in the UK. For how else can punishing people for trolling be justified if not to offer some justice for people who have been harassed and attacked for no other reason than they are vulnerable to such? None of these cases, though, were about any such thing. The first is that of Liam Stacey, a 21-year-old university student from Wales who tweeted some offensive and racist remarks relating to the collapse of English Premier League footballer Fabrice Muamba during a match. Stacey was drunk in the pub when he done this, and while a right dick he surely was being, the remarks were made on his own Twitter account and were hardly the actions of a determined sadist out to cause further misery to those affected by the footballer’s sudden collapse, or a very real racist trying to incite a pogrom against black people. Unfortunately for him though, the remarks were re-tweeted all the way around Twitter, causing outrage among many in Britain and leading 10 days later to Stacey being given a 56 day prison term for a ‘racially aggravated offence.’ The judge said this was to ‘reflect the public outrage’ at his drunken tweeting, which to me conjures up images of a roaring mob armed with flaming torches and pitchforks (or, if you like, Twitchforks) standing outside the courtroom to ‘make sure’ the judge hands out the ‘correct sentence’ to the accused.

  Stacey later said during a TV interview for Wales’s ‘Week In, Week Out’ program that he hadn’t even heard of Internet trolls before he himself was branded as one after his jailing, pointing out that he wasn’t getting up in the morning day after day with the intention to do what he done, unlike some actual Internet trolls. One of those trolls who had been getting up every day to do his trolling is one who is from the same area covered by the South Wales Police that were so quick to charge Stacey. This troll is 43-year-old Darren Burton, aka the infamous ‘Nimrod Severn’ who appeared on the television screens of millions to admit his RIP trolling and to mock even the thought of going to jail for it. Burton was, at least up to his appearance on TV in early 2012, one of the most prolific RIP trolls the Internet has ever seen, and as vile and evil as any of the rest of them. The police had visited him in late 2010 after I sent them screencaps of the very worst of his almost daily RIP trolling attacks on memorial pages, but even though he admitted it all to them they decided to lightly smack him on the wrist and advise him to ‘get a new hobby.’ Burton gloatingly messaged me on Facebook that same night to inform me of this, boasting that the police had given him ‘a license to troll.’ And indeed they may as well have, for Burton – shock and horror - ignored their advice to ‘get a new hobby’ for himself and went straight back to seeking out RIP pages on which to write sexual fantasies about the bodies of the deceased people that they were about. And even after the BBC tracked him down in February 2012 and broadcast his furious admission to millions, still the police didn’t charge him with any offence. The difference between the actions of this dedicated RIP troll sadist and those of the drunken idiot Liam Stacey could hardly be greater. Yet only one of them faced court for his actions, and that is indeed a true travesty. Some cops have given me the impression that they think the whole ‘torturing of the grieving on the Web thing’ to be nothing more than Internet high jinks that they can’t be wasting their time with. Fun and games.

  *If nothing else, Stacey’s case should be a warning to all to never, ever drink and hard drive. Drinking and hard driving ruins lives.

  Then in October came the jailing of Matthew Woods, 19, for 12 weeks after he made some sick ‘jokes’ on his own Facebook profile about a missing five-year-old girl by the name of April Jones; with 18-year-old Sam Busby being handed a suspended prison sentence the following month for similar ‘jokes’ made about the same missing girl, and again on his own personal Facebook page. Now, as much as I despise those who seek out the families of dead or missing children to make ‘jokes’ at them about their tragedies, these two characters only made the comments on their own Facebook pages, Woods doing so while drunk. This isn’t the same thing, not even nearly, with the irony being that the family of April Jones would never even have heard of Woods and Busby and their ‘jokes’ should they never have come to court for making them on personal Facebook profiles which the girl’s family members were never likely to view. In cases like these it’s better to let people in their social networks make the judgement on them, surely (and indeed Woods had to flee from an angry mob who visited his house in the wake of the comments).

  Another stupid abuse by the police of the Malicious Communications Act occurred again in October when 20-year-old Azhar Ahmed appeared in court to be given 240 hours community service for some comments he had made, again on his own Facebook profile, two days after a bomb attack in Afghanistan that killed six British soldiers. Wrote Ahmed: ‘People gassin about the deaths of Soldiers! What about the innocent familys who have been brutally killed. The women who have been raped. The children who have been sliced up! Your enemy's were the Taliban not innocent harmful [sic] familys. All soldiers should DIE & go to HELL! THE LOWLIFE F****N SCUM! Gotta problem. Go cry at your soldiers grave and wish him hell because that's where he is going.’

  The mother of one of the dead soldiers read his words and reported him to the police, but she only saw his comments in the first place because someone who was on his Facebook friend list took a screencap of them and posted it onto a Facebook page that had been set up in memory of the soldiers. But this was hardly Ahmed’s fault, and it was even acknowledged in court that he took the posting down from his profile after seeing the anger which it had caused. I see in it nothing more than someone expressing his political and religious views, even if they are liable to offend many. It actually dazzles me that he was hauled up to court for writing that, especially as it was on his own personal Facebook space. Ironically, it is having grown up in Northern Ireland, without doubt the most spectacularly bigoted and hate-filled little state in Western Europe, that has learned me and many others to be in one way tolerant of widely opposing viewpoints, even when they are vulgarly expressed. For if everyone in Northern Ireland was to express outrage over hate-filled remarks similar in tone to that one, the whole place and everyone in it would just cease functioning. (Yes, you now have people from Northern Ireland telling you to be more tolerant). Why is Azhar Ahmed’s comment on the supposed final destination of soldiers any worse than the preaching of any established Christian church on how anyone who doesn’t adhere to its dogmas is in danger of eternal torture by the same hellfire? Any society that seeks to prosecute opinions like Ahmed’s being expressed may indeed find itself on the slow road to fascism.

  All of those four cases differ widely from that of a Sean Duffy, most especially in the intent contained within them. Unlike some, I don’t see in the prosecutions a nefarious government conspiracy to shut down free speech on the Internet, I just see individual police reacting to public anger and taking stupid and ultimately self-defeating in the wider context prosecutions against easy marks. As opposed to the ‘anonymous’ trolls engaged in dedicated RIP trolling, all of those people were easy to immediately track down and pin stuff on. The triviality of many of the cases being brought led Britain’s top prosecutor Keir Starmer QC to issue new guidelines as to what Internet postings should and should not be grounds for prosecution in England and Wales. Said Starmer in late December 2012: ‘A prosecution is unlikely to be in the public interest if the communication is swiftly removed, blocked, not intended for a wide audience or not obviously beyond what could conceivably be tolerable or acceptable in a diverse society which upholds and respects freedom of expression. The interim guidelines thus protect the individual from threats or targeted harassment while protecting the expression of unpopular or unfashionable opinion about serious or trivial matters, or banter or humour, even if distasteful to some and painful to thos
e subjected to it.’

  I am pretty confident that the targeting of real RIP pages with grotesque photoshops of the deceased along with sexual comments and such-like about the dead person’s body will still be found to fall under ‘harassment’ and not under ‘humour,’ as it would take a psychopath to see such as real humour, and an idiot to believe it nothing more than a genuine attempt at such. Perverting an image of a dead child into something grotesque is its own form of child pornography.

  But the Malicious Communications Act wasn’t passed with something like RIP trolling in mind, and when you have a law on the books as nebulous as one that prohibits sending ‘by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character’ then it is open to abuse and misinterpretation.

  I’d say the big problem is with the term ‘grossly offensive.’ Everything is grossly offensive to somebody or other. As can many things be considered to be obscene. I consider the unspeakable desecration of Bob Dylan’s magnum opus Desolation Row by the emo band ‘My Chemical Romance’ to be both grossly offensive and utterly obscene. And I myself trolled and trolled hard on a Facebook page set up to celebrate the deeds of a dead serial killer; while also creating on the night Osama bin Laden went to meet his 72 maidens an Internet poster that consisted of his photograph above the caption, ‘Oh noes I got doxed!’ I’m sure there are a few who would find those things offensive and obscene too; myself, I would consider it more of a crime not to troll about the likes of those two. (And don’t try and say that this is the same thing as RIP trolling about dead children; I think when you decide to indulge in a bit of the ole serial killing like those two did you leave yourself open to more than ridicule, living or dead).

  Perhaps what is really needed to protect true freedom of speech while not letting the likes of a Colm Coss off with his crimes is the scrapping of the law containing those terms and the bringing in of a law specifically against publishing words or material lacking artistic, political, or other merit and that have been designed or conceived for the sole purpose of terrifying and otherwise mentally assaulting without reasonable provocation emotionally vulnerable people, or material promoting paedophilia against a named or otherwise implied living or dead person. (If you’re going around writing vile things about innocent children on tribute pages made in their names it could be quite reasonably argued that you were doing so with the intention of causing hurt to the bereaved, whether they seen it or not. It would be like pasting posters of the sick photoshops and remarks all around that family’s home area and then claiming that the intent was to annoy everyone who saw them except for the family in question).

  I want now to reproduce some of the comments that got Colm Coss sent to jail, something which may even have, in a way, set in motion that whole landslide of prosecutions in the first place. As horribly evil as these comments are, I feel justified in reproducing them as I do so not with the intent to hurt, which was the intent with which they were originally conceived and posted. Instead, I just want to show people exactly what sorts of things are being said to the families of dead people – mostly the families of dead children – day after day on the Internet, and then each person can make their own minds up as to whether or not this sort of thing is what people died fighting Hitler to protect. In all cases I have removed the names of the dead kids they were made about. While the context now is different, all of these comments were originally made on pages operated by either family members or close friends of the dead people in question.

  On a page operated by the friends of a 15-year-old girl who was stabbed to death:

  Colm Coss This crackwhore is sitting on my cock now in hell.

  When I have finished with her every other denizen of the place will play with her corpse for all eternity.

  On an RIP page operated by the family of a dead four-year-old boy:

  Colin Upson I ripped his eyeballs out and fucked the bloody dripping sockets. He never saw it coming.

  On a page run by the family of a two-year-old boy who died of leukaemia. His parents had set it up to ask for prayers before his death:

  Colin Upson I raped his fresh corpse the day he died.

  And on the same page:

  Colm Coss His parents are AIDS ridden crack whores, that’s why [name removed] had to die. They need to harvest his corpse for organs to sell on the black market.

  On a page made by the friends of a 17-year-old boy who died in a car smash:

  Colm Coss Bomford Sorry I’m late to the group guys! I just got here from a 3 day session of fucking [name removed] in every orifice he had (and some he didn’t know he had). My balls are as tight and shrivelled as walnuts and twice as hard.

  Firstly, I smashed the teeth out of his skull (this is surprisingly easy to do after a couple of days in the grave) then fucked his throat. I took each nasal cavity then turned to his ears.

  Second I slit the remains of his throat and fucked the bloated oesophagus until I had filled his lungs with spunk.

  The third round was the usual anal penetration and rape of the urethra (callipers are recommended).

  I took him between each of his toes and fingers – but who wouldn’t – and the back of his knees.

  There are a lot of things that comments like that can rightly be described as, but satire and humour are not among them; and if anyone can find a point of view being expressed somewhere in any of those then they should let the rest of us know. The only real joke to be found in them at all is Colm Coss himself, pushing the send button on his spewings as he downs another vodka while crying silently and hopelessly to himself. While it is still important to bring in some way to book the very worst of these RIP trolls, perhaps it is the case that the harshest sentence which a troll like that can be given is to be sentenced to live its life.

  Chapter Eight. Filming In Wales

  So many people are jealous of Tylor. They see in Tylor what they wish was true about themselves.

  Peter Partyvan

  Once upon a time, in a magical faraway world of their own imaginings, there lived these nasty little trolls.

  Said one of the trolls, Peter Partyvan, to some girls once who were making fun of him on Facebook: ‘You mean stupid drunken sluts who can’t form proper sentences. You cunts are a dime a dozen. And trust me, the sluts I fuck aren’t fatties who cover themselves in makeup to hide the fact they look like men.’

  But then some other trolls who didn’t like Peter hacked into some private conversations of his and found out that he is a virgin.

  ‘Ha ha ha ha’ went everyone back in the real world, before all wishing upon a falling star that the trolls really were just make-believe, just like Peter Partyvan’s sluts.

  And then all of the trolls lived very unhappily ever after.

  People whom these trolls haunt and harass are fond of telling them to just go and die and burn in hell, but they must bear in mind that RIP trolls died a long time ago in their lives and are burning in hell every second of their days. In fact, the only time that their flames become somewhat doused is when they see that they have become worthy of being told to go to hell, because even that is more than the nothing which they would otherwise receive from humanity at large. Imagine how unspeakably miserable and weak someone would have to be to feel a need to escape that by filling their days torturing bereaved people on the Internet. Like Peter Partyvan, their online lives are just big, easily seen through illusions.

  ‘Do not feed the trolls,’ runs the advice, and to an extent that is the greatest advice which can be given on the matter. Certainly when they come crawling onto a memorial page do not pass comment at all either to them or on them. No matter how personal it seems – and nothing could seem more personal than the taunting of a mother about her dead child – always remember that you and all the rest of the people whom they are trying to incite are just objects to them, and that if they don’t get any fun out of these objects then they will soon go away. Don’t ta
lk to them, don’t tell them to leave, and definitely do not rage at them or let them know how much they may be hurting you and how awful that you think they are. Rage and hurt from those they prey on are the petrol that keeps their engines burning; starve them of that fuel and they will break down and rust, not just on the Internet but back in their real lives too. Simply just report their profiles and then put them on ignore, taking quiet solace in the sure and certain knowledge that once they crawl away from that memorial page and back to their hateful realities that the flames will begin to lick again at them. They are already living in that place which you wished them banished to.

  So to that extent I say to ignore them totally and absolutely and to not give them what they want, which is for you to play at their game. Saying all that, there is one sort of attention that they don’t like and that is for their real lives to be so rudely intruded into, just like they themselves intrude into the lives of others. Oh you should see how precious they get about receiving that sort of attention, and so that sort of attention I say then that they should be given in abundance. Piss on the smoke of their illusions and leave them standing there naked for the world to point and laugh at. Bring reality crashing right back into their lives with a vengeance and let everyone see the sorry little creature who is standing behind the curtain while presuming to roar at the world in the trembling voice of the Great and Powerful Oz.