The Dark Net

by Jamie Bartlett

  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.

  Meeting the Trolls

  Finding genuine trolls is difficult. Many use proxy servers to mask their IP addresses and most have dozens of accounts with different names for each platform they use. If they are banned or blocked by a particular site, they’ll just rejoin under a new name. But like the Meowers, today’s trolls enjoy spending time with other trolls. A lot of the worst trolling is coordinated from hidden or secret channels and chat rooms.

  Zack agreed to show me one of his hideouts, inviting me in to a secret channel he’s been frequenting for over two years. It’s a private group on a well-known social media page, ‘a pirate base for trolls’, he told me. The main group page – the one the typical user sees – is a series of pictures of people masturbating. ‘That’s a facade,’ says Zack, ‘to keep away the dullards.’ To get to the real action, you have to be invited to join as a moderator by an existing moderator, granting you access to the group’s internal mailing system. Inside, the pace is frantic: every day there are constant, lengthy and hilarious arguments and discussions that draw in up to twenty moderators at once, some of whom know each other and some of whom do not. Everyone uses a fake name, because everyone has been banned from the site before, so I didn’t stand out – I could have been anyone. Everyone is trolling each other endlessly here, and most of the messages are very funny, and extremely sharp. According to Zack, at least two of the contributors are university professors. It feels like a training ground for trolls, a place to go to try out new tactics and battle others without too much damage being done. A place to come and relax, to wind down a little with some peers.

  While I was there, an infamous troll became a moderator too. Zack explained to me that this particular troll described himself as an ‘incel’, short for an ‘involuntary celibate’. This troll was well known in trolling circles for having run a blog in which he argued at length that the government owes him a woman to have sex with; and he boasted that he became so desperate that he once tried to have sex with his own mother. When he pushed his line on the group – that he should be able to have sex with anyone he wants, that the government should help him do so, that all girls are sluts anyway – no one could quite work out if he was trolling them or not. They were all fascinated, though, and started probing back, counter-trolling:

  Hey incel are you homophobic? like just for example pretend this was a real room we’re in and me and _______ started kissing, how would you feel about that? if it became really passionate and i was squeezing his soft little bum as i pushed my tongue deep down his neck? would you have opinions on that?

  No

  Hey incel – is your mother pretty? how many out of ten? is she a 7+ I’m just curious if your need for a girl to be hot as fuck (else you abuse them) extended to your mother . . .

  Um, yeah . . . I can only laugh at ya

  The other trolls in the group appeared to be sizing him up, searching for weaknesses. This is called ‘trolls trolling trolls’: when no one is really sure who’s trolling whom. It’s not about winning or losing, more like sparring.

  Old Holborn has been called Britain’s ‘vilest troll’ by the Daily Mail newspaper for his endless online abuse, including his attacks on the families of the ninety-six Liverpool football fans who died in the Hillsborough disaster in 1989. He tweets and blogs constantly, hiding his face behind a Guy Fawkes mask. Without it, he’s not quite as intimidating: a well-dressed, fast-talking middle-aged man from Essex, a successful computer programmer and recruitment specialist, he tells me. ‘You could call me a gobshite,’ he explains over coffee. ‘Always have been. I’m very anti-authoritarian.’ He’s more than that, he’s a minarchist – someone who believes in the smallest possible government. ‘We just need someone there to protect private property. Everything else, we can work out ourselves.’ He sums up his world view: ‘the government should just leave us alone’. Trolling is his way of causing trouble for the system: ‘I want to be the itch, the grain of sand in the machine.’ In 2010 he stood for Parliament in Cambridge, wearing his mask and frustrating the Electoral Commission by changing his name to Old Holborn by deed poll. Around the same time, he marched into a police station in Manchester wearing the mask and carrying a suitcase full of five-pound notes to post bail for a pub owner who’d refused to enforce the 2007 ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces. This, he says, is also trolling.

  It’s hard to see what insulting the families of the Hillsborough disaster victims on Twitter has to do with minarchy. But there is a link. To live in Old Holborn’s libertarian stateless utopia, people need to be tough and independent, and take responsibility for their actions. He fears a silent and obedient society, and says that one where everyone is easily offended will lead to self-censorship. He sees it as his role to prod and probe the boundaries of offensiveness to keep society alert. He targeted the Liverpudlians, he says, to ‘prove’ that they suffered from victimhood syndrome – and for Old Holborn, just like the Usenet trolls, the unit of success was the reaction. ‘I would be controversial, just to show that they loved feeling like the victims. The response was phenomenal: they threatened to burn down my office, my house, and rape my children. Haha! I was right! They proved I was right!’

  As a result, though, he was doxed and – soon after we met – he’d moved to southern Bulgaria to, in his words, ‘cause trouble full-time’ from there. ‘I’m the good guy!’ he shouted in the cafe. ‘I’m the one exposing the hypocrisy. I’m the one trying to make society freer!’

  The Truth about Trolls

  In the 1980s and 1990s, as a growing number of people went online, psychologists became interested in how computers were changing our thoughts and behaviour. In 1990, the American lawyer and author Mike Godwin proposed a natural law of Usenet behaviour: ‘As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving the Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.’ In short, the more you talk online, the more likely you’ll be nasty; talk long enough, and it’s a certainty. (Godwin’s Law can easily be observed today on the pages of most newspapers’ online comments boards.) In 2001, John Suler’s famous Online Disinhibition Effect put forward a reason why. It listed six factors that, Suler claimed, allowed users of the internet to ignore the social rules and norms at play offline.fn8 He argues that because we don’t know or see the people we are speaking to (and they don’t know or see us), because communication is instant, seemingly without rules or accountability, and because it all takes place in what feels like an alternative reality, we do things we wouldn’t in real life. Suler call this ‘toxic disinhibition’. According to other academic studies, between 65 and 93 per cent of human communication is non-verbal: facial expression, tone, body movement. Put very simply, our brain has evolved over millions of years to subconsciously spot these cues so we can better read and empathise with each other. Communicating via computers removes these cues, making communication abstract and anchorless. Or, as the web comic Penny Arcade has it: ‘The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory’: ‘normal person + anonymity + audience = total fuckwad’.

  The easiest way to deal with the trolls is to remove their anonymit
y, to force websites or platforms to insist that everyone log in under their real names. That wouldn’t stop online nastiness entirely of course, but it would at least make trolls a little more accountable for their actions, and perhaps encourage them to hesitate before abusing others. But removing anonymity online has its drawbacks. Anonymity is not a modern invention designed to protect trolls. It also allows people to be honest and open and invisible when there are good reasons to. We dispense with that at our peril.

  Get rid of trolling and we might lose something else, too. The line between criminality, threats, offensiveness and satire is another very fine one. Trolls like Old Holborn do occasionally cast a satirical eye on society’s self-importance, expose the absurdity of modern life, moral panics or our histrionic twenty-four-hour news culture. One branch of trolls, called ‘RIP memorial trolls’, target people who post messages to online memorial pages of the recently deceased. According to Whitney Phillips, an academic who wrote her Ph.D. on trolls, they usually target what they call ‘grief tourists’: users who have no real-life connection to the victim and who could not possibly be in mourning. The trolls themselves claim that grief tourists are shrill, disingenuous and wholly deserving targets. The Gay Niggers Association of America frequently posts ridiculous news stories in the hope that lazy journalists will repeat them. They often do: a GNAA story alleging that African Americans were looting people’s homes during Hurricane Sandy in order to steal domestic pets that was widely reported by mainstream media outlets. Within the trolling community, the undisputed champions of trolling ‘in real life’ are considered to be US comedian Stephen Colbert and British comedy writer Chris Morris, both famous for puncturing the inflated egos of politicians and celebrities.

  Zack claims that his work has value and purpose too – ‘trolling in the public interest’ to expose hypocrisy and stupidity in society. He has even created his own complicated religion, which he’s spent years pulling together, simply to use as a trolling tool. He calls it ‘auto-didactic time travel pragmatism’, a mixture of absurd humour, physics and fragments borrowed from other religions. He uses it to troll religious and political groups. ‘It’s the tried and tested hazing technique of presenting someone with something that is impossible to know whether or not to take seriously – impossible to know where the joke ends and the seriousness begins.’ It’s a clever tactic, and – to my surprise – one with significant ramifications for contemporary theological debate.fn9

  While many trolls are simply bored teenagers trying to cause a little trouble, the serious trolls seem to broadly follow a libertarian ideology, and believe that part of living in a free society is accepting that no idea is beyond being challenged or ridiculed, and that nothing is more stifling to free expression than being afraid to upset or offend. Trolls have existed just as long as networked computing, which surely says something about the need many of us have to explore the darker sides of our nature. Every troll I’ve spoken to says what they do is natural, a human need to push a boundary simply because it’s there.

  The problem with a boundary-pushing philosophy is that it can be used to justify bullying and threatening people with no regard for the consequences. When I asked Zack if he’s ever gone too far he nods, ‘Yeah, I guess there were a few people who I hounded so bad that they left the internet. One had a mental breakdown.’ Does he feel responsible? ‘At the time, I didn’t – we all knew what we were doing. Although now I’m less sure.’ Old Holborn is more resolute: ‘I pick my targets carefully. They always deserve it.’ But the powerful and the rich are not always the targets. Too often it is the weak, the newcomers like Sarah, who are the easiest to attack. Anonymous users on /b/ pick on camgirls because their pictures and threads are wildly popular: far more than the normal /b/tard thread. Ultimately Old Holborn agrees with /b/: ‘Would you go post photos of yourself and put them on the internet? So why did she do it? It’s not about teaching her a lesson, but she has to be responsible.’ Zack is uneasy about Sarah’s case, but finally concludes, ‘Well, she probably shouldn’t have done that, although she didn’t deserve the consequences.’

  To me, the Sarah dox just felt like crude nastiness. The perpetrators made a limp effort at justifying it: ‘That silly bitch may have learnt the most important lesson of her young life tonight: that posting pictures of your naked body on the internet is a monumentally bad idea.’ I’m sure she did learn a painful lesson, but that was only a side-effect of the ‘life ruin’:

  Anonymous said: I’m a moral fag

  I see no problem in doxing sarah’s ass

  It’s for the lulz

  At the top of the tree of life there isn’t love: there is lulz

  Whatever their motives, and even at their worst, perhaps we can learn something from trolls. Trolling is a very broad church, ranging from /b/ bullies to amateur philosophers, from the mildly offensive to the illegal. An increasing desire for digital affirmation is leading more of us to share our most intimate and personal lives online, often with complete strangers. What we like, what we think, where we’re going. The more we invest of ourselves online and the more ready we are to be offended, the more there is for trolls to feed on. And despite the increasing policing of social media sites, trolling is not going anywhere. It has been a central feature of online life since the mid-1970s, evolving and mutating from an unexpected offshoot of electronic communication within a niche community to an almost mainstream phenomenon. For people like Zack, the degeneration of trolling from creative art to random threats and bullying is frustrating. But that won’t stop him.

  Whether we like it or not, trolling is a feature of the online world today. As we all live more of our lives online, trolls might help us to recognise some of the dangers of doing so, make us a little more careful, and a little more thick-skinned. One day, we might even thank them for it.

  Epilogue

  Four days after Sarah’s ordeal, another /b/ camgirl was doxed, with photos sent to all her family members, her employer and her boyfriend: ‘Do you know your girlfriend posts pictures of her tits on the internet? You can see them here _____’

  ‘Another day, another harsh reality,’ wrote one.

  ‘She’ll be back,’ replied another.

  * * *

  fn1 If you did, you were one of over twenty million people who were ‘rickrolled’ that year.

  fn2 A Usenet hierarchy about this book, for example, might be called ‘rec.books.darknet’

  fn3 The word ‘troll’ most likely refers to the fishing technique of trailing (‘trolling’) a baited line, to see what bites, rather than to the mythical cave dweller.

  fn4 An impressive number considering that for its first two years the site was nothing more than a photograph of a squirrel with enormous testicles.

  fn5 SomethingAwful users continue to attack other boards and forums in a similar way.

  fn6 The former ‘President’ of GNAA is considered to be a hacker and troll named ‘Weev’.

  fn7 A ‘black fax’ is a fax of a black page, sent to waste the ink of the recipient’s fax machine.

  fn8 Suler’s six factors are dissociative anonymity (my actions can’t be attributed to my person), invisibility (nobody can tell what I look like, or judge my tone), asynchronicity (my actions do not occur in real time), solipsistic introjection (I can’t see these people; I have to guess at who they are and their intent), dissociative imagination (this is not the real world; these are not real people) and minimisation of authority (there are no authority figures here, I can act freely).

  fn9 You have been trolled.

  Chapter 2

  The Lone Wolf

  I FIRST MET Paul in a working men’s club in a town in the north of England one cold autumn evening. He looked young, with a handsome face, short dark hair, and tattoos that climbed up his neck. He was good company: polite, attentive and quick to laugh. In short, Paul and I got on very well. Until, that is, talk turned to politics. ‘Just think of the beauty that will die, Jamie,’ he explained. ‘What do you
think the world will be like under black or Paki or brown rule? Can you imagine it? When we’re down to the last thousand whites, I hope one of them scorches the fucking earth, and everything on it.’

  Paul is a one-man political party, a propaganda machine. He spends all day, every day, trying to spark a racial awakening among white Britons. He runs a popular blog about ethnocentrism and White Pride, and produces and posts videos attacking minority groups. He opens his laptop and shows me his recent activity: a heated debate with members of a left-wing political group; messages of support for the Greek Golden Dawn party; communications with white supremacists in the United States. He loads up his Facebook and Twitter pages. Thousands of people, from all over the world, follow Paul’s breathless output on social media. Online, he has found a community who share his beliefs and appreciate his posts. He has also attracted an equally vocal group dedicated to opposing his views and taking him offline. He lives in a one-dimensional world of friends and enemies, right and wrong – and one where he has been spending increasing amounts of time. The digital Paul is a dynamic, aggressive and prominent advocate of the White Pride movement. The real Paul is an unemployed thirty-something who lives alone in a small house.