Hackers on Steroids

  *Actual real troll comment. Paging Dr Freud. Paging Dr Freud.

  But pigs oink. That’s what pigs do. You can expect no different from such an animal, them being pigs. But why are whole hordes of grunting pig-beasts that have escaped from the farm at 4Chan being allowed to run through the Facebook and Youtube and Twitter towns oinking at all the citizens out going about their own business? Cannot the mayors of those towns build strong enough gates to keep these packs of marauding beasts from rampaging through their communities and terrifying their citizens? Keep these stinking hogs out in the wastelands of the Internet where they belong; allow them to run free in the outer reaches where no decent or even half-sane human being will ever set eyes on the foul things. Instead, 4Chan has been allowed by the powers that be to become an empire nation building colonies in places which human beings already inhabit. The invaders are going to have to be kicked out and the gates then sealed against them. As important as it is for the likes of a Duffy or a Hampson to feel the long arm of the law around their brass necks, there is no solution to the problem of organised and mass psycho-trolling in law. Some of the hydra’s heads may indeed be cut off from it, but more and more heads will only continue to grow out from it until at last the beast itself is slain; not by the law but by taking away that which feeds it: the ability of trolls to easily create an infinite number of profiles on social networks. This is the only solution.

  And it’s the only solution, too, to the child pornography networks that are operating on these sites. Either people through their politicians and through the media force Facebook and others to rethink the way profiles can come into their networks, or they just accept that social networking sites are places where psychopaths and paedophiles have a free hand to openly congregate on and places whereon they can freely prey on the vulnerable. On your Facebook profile you can change your age and sex as easily as your name. That needs to stop for sure: who the hell needs to change their sex except those who have had an actual sex change?! And as there aren’t too many of those people about it wouldn’t cost Facebook too much time to look into any requests from users seeking to change what sex is displayed on their profiles, with only those who actually have had a sex change being allowed to do so. And age should definitely not ever be allowed to be changed. But all this would only really matter anyway if profiles were made harder to get into the system. If nothing changes, then on and on and on it will go.

  On and on and on will go the emotional and mental torture, and the child grooming, and the identity theft, and the anonymous bullying, and the child porn swapping, and the paedophile networking, and the murders. Ever since I wrote in chapter five of the murders of Ashleigh Hall, Noma Belomesoff, and Nomfundu Tyulu, all brutally slain after being lured to their deaths via the use of fake Facebook identities, two more similar murder cases have been in the news. In England, 19-year-old Tony Bushby was jailed for 25 years for murdering Catherine Wynter, also 19, who he tricked into going out with him by creating four different fake Facebook identities, all of which he used to prey on her and convince her to date him, an outcome this psychopath only worked towards so that he would have the opportunity to inflict violence on the girl. In Texas, 30-year-old Franklin Davis admitted to police shooting dead 16-year-old Shania Gray after luring her into meeting him by posing as a teenage boy on Facebook. She was to give evidence against him in court.

  Anonymity is both the Internet’s greatest blessing and its greatest curse. It allows the psychos and the child abusers to thrive together and to seek out prey at will; yet paradoxically it offers people on forums and blogs a strong layer of protection against violence from other users. Forum feuds can go on for years and can get very personal, with the anonymous nature of such bringing out the worst in people at times and giving rise to real hatred and bitterness. It can be hilarious to witness a debate about Palestine/Israel get so heated that it would appear as if the entire outcome of the conflict depended on one Internet argument between two men from Belfast. And some people can definitely take online arguments a bit too far. In 2006, 47-year-old Paul Gibbons travelled 40 miles from his home in London armed with a pickaxe handle and a machete-wielding friend to the house of John Jones after the two had gotten into an argument in a chat room. He cut Jones - who had dared him to come and get him - on the neck with his own knife, and was jailed for two years for it. It’s almost comical, but not, I suppose, for Jones.

  But forums and blogs and the likes are the places for Internet anonymity. Not social networks. Not when we’ve seen what anonymity has brought about there. Yeah, some psycho-trolls and paedophiles will happily float about in their little online dream worlds while using their real identities, but this doesn’t apply to the great majority of them. For the great majority, it is their perceived anonymity that inspires them in their evil online deeds. And much of the problem could so easily be countered by the social networks – and Youtube, which has its own packs of organised RIP trolls and other such cyberpaths – simply creating systems that would eventually make it really hard for those who keep getting banned from their networks to constantly come back time and time again. I think my idea about each new profile having to be vouched for by three already well-established accounts would work, but I’m sure that if the owners of Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube each have in them any sort of a real desire to stop their applications being used for extremely evil purposes that they’ll find ideas of their own. No-one is asking for an anodyne Internet, but we can’t accept a dystopian one either. These are real people’s lives that are being messed with and destroyed here. If these big social networking companies feel as if there is nothing that really can be done to put a stop to all this predatory evil on their sites then they must be made to admit that they have birthed Frankenstein’s monsters which are now out of their control.

  Cyberbullying of school kids by their peers – something that is reportedly now commonplace - brings pressures into areas of their lives where they would have previously felt safe. Children suffering sustained Internet campaigns against themselves may suddenly begin to see their bedrooms as an invaded space, and if that bullying is also taking place physically in school then it may seem to the victimised child that there is no real escape to be had from it all. Those who opine that all those kids have to do is to log off from their computers simply have no idea whatsoever about human psychology. If you know that someone is saying nasty and very personal things about you on the Internet then you’d have the almost insuppressible urge to look at it all again and again. And even if you could somehow stop yourself from giving into that macabre and very human curiosity which demands that you view all the bad stuff which is being said about you, then there’s the very real likelihood that, unless you have a strong mind, your imagination would begin dreaming up all sorts of horrible possibilities to fill in the blanks with and tormenting you then at all times of the day and night with them. There is no logging off from that whatever the vacuous and ignorant may say. And while most adults would find themselves strong enough to deal with this sort of thing without it getting to them too much, such things are amplified when you are a young teenager and when what is said and by whom can seem to you to mean the end of the world.

  It’s not the fault of companies like Facebook – the premier choice for Internet bullies - that some people are horrible and stupid. And Facebook will take down any accounts that are reported to them as being used to harass people – but need I even mention by now that new accounts are only going to spring back up again to take their place? And for that they do need to share in the blame. But it’s not just on Facebook with its anonymously created ‘fan pages,’ a favourite tool of the cyberbully, that modern technology is being used as a weapon to inflict on people an age-old torture. And as the steady drip-drip-drip of child suicides that have been laid partially or fully at the door of cyberbullying shows, the pain all of this is causing is very, very real indeed:

  Ryan Halligan, from Vermont. Committed suicide aged 13 in 2003 after being const
antly tormented and humiliated online by bullies from his school. The bullying he suffered at school followed him all throughout the summer break via the medium of the Internet. He hanged himself that October.

  Megan Meier, from Missouri. 13 when she committed suicide in 2006 after being targeted for bullying and humiliation by Lori Drew, a woman in her 40s and a neighbour of Megan Meier. Drew created a fake Myspace profile in the name of ‘Josh Evans,’ a fictitious 16-year-old boy, and after leading Megan on for weeks ‘Josh’ suddenly turned on the girl and took to telling her how much everyone hated her, as well as sharing their private messages with people Megan knew. ‘Everybody in O'Fallon knows who you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you,’ was the last message Drew sent to Megan Meier. 21 minutes after replying to that message with: ‘You’re the kind of boy a girl would kill herself over,’ Megan Meier was found hanging in her bedroom. She died the next day, never knowing that ‘Josh Evans’ was an evil woman 30 years her senior.

  Natasha MacBryde, from Worcestershire in England and 15 when she killed herself by waiting in front of a coming train in 2010. She had been getting taunted at school and the abuse had carried over then to the Internet, with her family saying that they believe some anonymous postings made on a website called Formspring on the day of her death ‘were a significant contributor’ to the decision she made to take her own life.

  In Ireland in the space of a few months in 2012 we had a spate of four teenage suicides – two of them sisters – that cyberbullying was said to have helped to cause either directly or indirectly. In September, 15-year-old Ciara Pugsley from County Leitrim hanged herself after enduring months of anonymous cyberabuse on a site called ask.fm, a website based in Latvia that allows users to target with complete anonymity other users with questions and comments. ‘These faceless, nameless people are coming into our homes and abusing our children, and that has to be morally, totally unacceptable,’ said her father in a television interview.

  A 12-year-old girl from County Kildare, Lara Burns, hanged herself in some horse stables behind her house in November. After her death, her friends said that she had suffered months of what they described as severe online bullying, and laid the blame for her suicide with that. While the girl’s family have stated that they feel as if they will never know as to what her reasons were for killing herself, there is no doubt that the child had been suffering from a sustained campaign of cyberbullying in the months leading up to her death.

  In October, a 13-year-old girl from County Donegal called Erin Gallagher too hanged herself after also enduring a campaign of anonymous abuse directed towards her, this on that same ask.fm site implicated in Ciara Pugsley’s suicide. Whoever the bully or bullies were in this case had used fake ask.fm accounts to try to set up three innocent girls to take the blame for the abuse, and the homes of two of these girls were subsequently attacked by vigilantes. Erin Gallagher’s 15-year-old sister Shannon took then her own life in December, unable to cope with the death of her sister.

  Anonymous messages posted on - again - Ask.fm were blamed as the trigger in the suicide of 16-year-old Jessica Laney in Florida in December 2012. While the girl certainly had other problems in her life there was clearly a serious amount of nasty abuse being directed at her on the website in the lead-up to her suicide, including a plea for the girl to ‘kill yourself already.’ When the mind becomes unbalanced for whatever reason and spirits and confidences are low, such things can become like screams in the mind echoing again and again within it.

  And those are just some of the well-known cases. Who indeed knows how many deaths cyberbullying has played a real part in? While the reasons for suicide are usually a lot more complicated than just any one single matter, and in most cases we certainly are talking about deeper and more complex problems than just abuse on websites, that’s not to say that the cyberbullying itself wasn’t a major factor in some if not all of those suicides (and in the case of Megan Meier, her cybertormentor is an outright murderer). The most infamous case of cyberbullying in recent times is that of Canadian girl Amanda Todd, 15 when she committed suicide. When she was 13 a paedophile preyed on her on a webcam site, talking her into flashing the top half of her body at him. He took a photograph of this and after finding the girl on Facebook used the photograph and an anonymous profile to try and blackmail her into doing sex cam shows for him, which she refused to do. The paedophile used Facebook then to send the half-naked photograph of her around to people in her community, and the girl began suffering bullying at school because of this, descending then into a hell of depression and drugs. Her family moved her to a new school and a new community, but the same paedophile found her again and once more used Facebook to spread around the topless photograph he had of her, again leading to bullying and another new school. A tangled love affair at the new school and Amanda Todd was physically attacked by a number of girls, something that inspired a suicide attempt. The suicide attempt – she drunk bleach and ended up in hospital having her stomach pumped – was the cue for months of mockery on the Internet and her family moving her away again to a new school, and new bullying. She hanged herself at home on the evening of October 10th 2012, the sad end of a living hell that all began with one particularly psychotic paedophile running wild with the power that the Internet had bestowed upon him.

  All those children gone forever from the world, all they were and all they could have been. All the encounters they would have had, the impressions they would have left in the world, the future generations that they would have eventually made, now ripples in a pond which are never to be. Like Lori Drew, the entity who originally targeted Amanda Todd is a plain murderer; and both of those creatures murdered not just two girls between them but who knows how many future people who now will never exist. And in the cases of Megan Meier, Natasha MacBryde, and Amanda Todd – as with so many other suicides linked to online torment – once the original bullies had done their work then came to feed on the pain left behind the subhuman ghoul-things that are RIP trolls. It’s like some sort of satanic production line with one form of cyberbully helping to bring about the deaths and then another form of the same coming after those deaths to try and take their names and the memories others have of them. Each one of those children – as also in so many other cases too - posing for a photograph for their loving family and never being able to know that soon that same photograph of the smiling, healthy child would be warped into some grotesque weapon of torment by sadists determined to psychologically break their sorrowing families on the rack.

  Amanda Todd’s suicide made headlines all across the world, helped by an unforgettable Youtube video that she made shortly before her death detailing the torment which she was going through and what had led her into it. After her death the poor girl became, in a most unenviable way, famous, and so descended on her name the professional mourners and their fellow travellers the RIP trolls. On October 23rd, not two weeks after her tragic death, I decided for the purposes of this book to count how many so-called ‘memorial’ pages had been made in her name on Facebook. The number was 449.

  The real grief tourists had pitched their circus tents and on came the troupe of clowns and wild beasts, all of them turning the girl’s death into some obscene Internet battle between themselves. The professional mourners know as much about respect for the dead as the trolls they love to battle with. It’s hard to pick which sort are more loathsome, and somewhere in it all a real family has to deal with the real death of their real daughter, now thought of as a commodity for the sick and the needy and the stupid of the Internet. One of the groups, which now seems to be closed, had over 1.2 million likes. Some of the others have hundreds of thousands of likes. The sick and sorry sight of hundreds of ‘memorial’ pages being made in the name of Amanda Todd should say it all when it comes to why Facebook needs to drastically change the way RIP pages can go live on its system. The large number of clicks that some of those g
roups generate says why they probably won’t bother to. The circus will keep coming to new towns and cities on its never-ending tour.