Hackers on Steroids (15 page)

In April of this year of 2012 some otherwise insignificant member of this sadistic subspecies made a fake Facebook account in the name of Jordan Agar, a 16-year-old boy from Staffordshire, England, who had just days before died in a moped crash. The psychotic then sent a message to the boy’s mother that read: ‘Mum, I’m not dead. I’m sat at the computer. I just ran away.’ Another message said that the boy had gone to hell.

His mother, Bridget Agar, told a newspaper: ‘I was disgusted. How could anyone send a grieving mother a message pretending to be from her dead son? There are no words to describe what these people are. They are not human.’

Indeed they are not. And there have been easily thousands of them on Facebook who have done or are still doing this sort of thing, some of them alone and others in packs of various sizes. All those families dealing with the sudden and completely unexpected death of a loved one and having no idea that such evil is closing in on them, that the vultures of cyberspace are circling overhead and getting ready to swoop down and feed on their grief. But what steps are Facebook taking to stop all of this?

The horror behind the horror. Sean Duffy outside court on the day he was sentenced to prison.

Hunter
Mello. Kind of like the Mafia.

Jessica Cook. Troll sweetheart.

Malcolm Blackman. 45.

Colm Coss leaving court on the day he pled guilty to offences
under the UK’s Malicious Communications Act. His master plan to bring me down backfired spectacularly on him.

Bradley Hampson. The first RIP troll in the world to face court for his actions. 

Whitney Phillips, now a lecturer at New York University and a constant media go-to regarding RIP trolling. Could be said to enjoy a very close relationship indeed with RIP troll ‘Paulie Socash.’

Damon Evans confronted on television about his RIP trolling.

Darren ‘Nimrod Severn’ Burton is caught by a BBC television crew. In the hood is Kirsty Chapman, his girlfriend and fellow RIP troll.

Kirsty ‘Percy’ Chapman
as photographed by
The Daily Mail
. Mother of three and RIP troll.

Nothing is more important to us than the safety of the people who use our service.

Facebook spokesperson

Hardly a week goes by that Facebook doesn’t have to respond to journalists who are reporting on incidents of RIP trolling on its website.

In the March of 2010 I began regularly searching Google News for newspaper and television reports about trolling on Facebook, and since then I have collected hundreds of articles from around the English-speaking world on separate memorial page attacks. Some of those attacks have made national headlines in countries such as Australia, America, Canada, and the UK; while others have been reported on only in regional areas. 

Each time the media will contact Facebook to ask for its reaction to the trolling and each time Facebook will issue a statement advising anyone who is suffering because of this sort of harassment on its site to report it to them and they will make everything all right again. In fact, whenever I find a news article on a new trolling attack on Facebook I will know right away even before I read it just what Facebook itself will have to say about it. They will start off by saying that: ‘It’s against Facebook’s rules to intimidate or harass others, and we provide everyone with the tools to report such content.’ The press release will then go on to claim: ‘When abuse is reported to us, we react swiftly, and we will disable accounts that are found to be in breach of our terms,’ before going on with: ‘We strongly encourage people using Facebook to use our tools whenever needed and to report objectionable content so we can investigate reports and take action.’ Sometimes it will be reported that the message ended with this bit of reassuring falsehood: ‘Nothing is more important to us than the safety of the people that use our service.’

Always the same words are used and it makes me wonder if the company directs journalists to a pre-recorded answering machine message when they ring up to ask for a response to the trolling they are reporting on. ‘Hello, you have reached Facebook. Press 1 for information on stocks and shares; press 2 if you are seeking a job application form; press 3 for a statement on trolling.’

Whichever way Facebook puts those press releases out, the deeply impersonal nature of the same statement being trotted out time and time again says a lot about how much they actually care about or pay attention to each attack. They receive an inquiry from a journalist about a certain RIP or other kind of psycho-trolling attack and they fob them off with that same prewritten statement and then hope that it is the end of the matter.

But it’s never really the end of the matter: not for the people it has most badly affected, and not for the trolls either who will keep on making new accounts and trolling about the same target until they get bored and move on to new targets. And so it goes on, attack after attack, year after year, heartbreak after heartbreak.

In the wonderful world painted by the smiling corporate cunts of Facebook these offenders will have their accounts banned and that will take care of that. Except that they never seem to add that it takes only a minute or two to make another account and that there is nothing stopping anybody opening as many of these free accounts as they want under any identity which they so desire. And so therein lies the root of the problem: a revolving door system that kicks offenders out of the club only to allow them straight back in again without any identity verification being needed from them whatsoever. Those trolls usually have multiple profiles running at the same time, and a dedicated, long-term troll can easily have went through hundreds of profiles - or even well over a thousand in some cases. I have often witnessed trolls go through multiple accounts in one day. I recall being told by one of them, I believe it was Colm Coss, that he estimated himself to have went through over 600 profiles, and that was a year and a half ago.

But why should Facebook care? Billions of dollars keeps rolling in, millions upon millions of new users keep on signing up, and the adulation and fame keeps on coming for CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In May of this year of writing (2012), Facebook went on the stock market and Zuckerberg’s personal worth now bounces up and down around the $20 billion mark. Although share prices have dropped since the initial public flotation it has nothing to do with trolling and the Zuck won’t be going hungry any time soon for either money or fame. He was made Time Man of the Year for 2010 and is held up as one of the greatest innovators of our time. He has appeared on stage to be fawned over by Barack Obama; and Forbes magazine ranks him as the 9th most powerful person in the world, ahead of Hilary Clinton, the President of India, and the prime ministers of both Britain and China. More people use his application than the total combined populations of the United States, Japan, Brazil, Germany, and Mexico. comScore, a company which studies Internet data, estimated in October 2011 that one in every seven minutes spent online in the world is passed on Facebook, and that figure has probably only gotten higher since then. Billions of hours each month are collectively spent clicking through the endless links and pages that stretch on through infinity in the ever-expanding Facebook universe. The system that Facebook operates is working on a widely successful level and those who benefit the most from it have no desire to tinker too much with any significant part of it. 

It’s all about making money (obviously), and the more active accounts there are, the more money flows in from advertisers. A smaller amount of the billions of dollars in revenue that Facebook makes annually comes from games on its site, but the great majority comes from advertising. At only 28, Mark Zuckerberg owns what is the greatest advertising company in history. It has placed him on the top of the world, and most likely he is going to stay there. Why would he choose to see a problem in a system that has brought him so much wealth and fame and power? The morality of giving psychopaths an easily entered dreamland wherein they can inflict their darkest fantasies and fetishes on real people just doesn’t come into it. Zuckerberg is sitting atop a huge throne of green and looking down at the world from it. Nothing is really more important to Facebook than the money of the advertisers that use its service.

Image is vitally important to the corporation and no matter how many negative reports there are about trolling on Facebook, they never seem to take the shine of it - and this the company well knows. If the trolling was adversely affecting business you can be sure that it would have been well stamped out by now. Since 2011, Facebook has required people making accounts on it to provide a phone number for verification purposes. If this is really meant to keep the trolls, spammers and other fakes off, then the utter failure of this experiment is borne out by these figures: in December 2011 the company revealed that of its then 845 million profiles which were active on a monthly basis, as many as 6% of them - that is, 50 million profiles - were either duplicate accounts, or fake and underage profiles. As of the beginning of August of 2012 that figure of fake and duplicate profiles - out of now 955 million profiles active on a monthly basis - is now as much as 8.7% of all accounts, or almost 84 million profiles. Spare sim cards for mobile phones cost next to nothing - or sometimes actually nothing, as multiples of them are given away free in promotions all the time - and all a determined troll needs to bypass Facebook’s verification process and make a new account is a new phone number. The fact of continued mass trolling by the same and new individuals - along with the rest of the fake profiles - makes an absolute mockery of Facebook’s phone number verification system; and an even bigger mockery of its so-called ‘real name culture’ that demands of people signing up to its application that they don’t give false details while doing so.

There’s nothing else in place to check that they don’t give false details, they just ask them not to. As if that’s meant to stop trolls making fake identities on the system.

Overall, the problems they have with these so-called trolls are negligible. In all likelihood, RIP trolling has made them much more money than it has lost them. The same individuals using multiple accounts help to generate millions more in advertising revenue for the company. The ads are usually put in the sidebar of pages on Facebook, and the more clicks that are made through the different pages on the site then the more ads are generated and the more money Facebook makes. The more profiles that are active on the site, then the more clicking through the pages there will be; and the more multiple identities any one individual has, then the more time they are likely to spend on Facebook clicking, clicking, and clicking. Of the now almost 84 million profiles that the company has classified as ‘fakes,’ over 45 million are there because people like to have more than one real-name profile for legitimate reasons, such as keeping some untamed friends out of sight of their family and their boss. Over 22 million of the 84 million ‘fake’ profiles are what Facebook terms ‘user-misclassified,’ that is profiles in the names of pets, or profiles named after businesses and organisations. 1.5% of the total profiles on the system - or over 14 million - are the accounts of more serious rule-breakers: spammers, trolls, underage users, and others.  

Spammers on Facebook, in case you didn’t know, are those people who post non-paid-for ads for knockoff pills and the like onto legitimate discussion threads. These the Facebook system is set up to automatically detect, and if you are found by the computer system to be posting on too many pages in quick succession you may find yourself with an automatic time-related ban. Keep it up and your account will soon be disabled by the Facebook police who will be alerted to you by the computer program set up to automatically hunt down spammers. I know this first-hand because in my early days of troll outing I spammed the real details of a few trolls around myself. The reason why Facebook takes such a proactive stance against these free advertising spammers speaks for itself.

On the underage side, a 2011 investigation by ConsumerReports.org found that there were then seven-and-a-half million underage users on the site - and that five million of them were under the age of 10. The figure should be even higher as of now. Although in fairness, that is at least as much the fault of the parents of those kids than it is Facebook’s for not having in place a system which stops underage kids from coming onto their network in the first place.

Other fake profiles are set up by criminal scammers in order to try and mine information from people’s profiles that may be of monetary value or to trick people into visiting off-Facebook groups, some of which will infect your computer with a virus or with software which will allow hackers into your system. The vast, vast majority of these fake profiles – as far as I have seen anyway - use pictures of stunningly beautiful women as their avatars, and you will also find that in most of these cases they list themselves as being bisexual, just to really raise men’s interest in them. If you’re a man and are contacted on Facebook out of the blue by a strange and beautiful woman who is seeking your friendship, you can almost be certain that it is not because of your sex appeal. I used the same ‘Trojan Horse’ trick on countless occasions to gain access to the real-life profiles of many trolls (I mostly always used the same picture of a woman that I found by searching through the Google image results for ‘70s porno film’ - I didn’t think that the actress in question would mind too much). Nine times out of ten, the idiots fell easily for it. Men are obviously much less guarded when it comes to strange women than women are when it comes to strange men, so it is men who are targeted the most for this kind of thing.

Most of the rest of the ‘undesirables’ in Facebook’s population, in my experience, would be found to be there for more legitimate reasons, such as satire and other forms of comedy, political debate, activism, and the more traditional kind of trolling, the kind that does no real harm. RIP trolls make up only a very tiny percentage of the fake accounts, but like the various ‘white power’ movements on the fringes of Western societies they get much more than their fair share of publicity and exposure exactly because of the shock value of the violence that they like to inflict on others, whether that is physical or, in the case of the RIP trolls, psychological.

In March 2011, Facebook revealed that it is daily forced to ban 20,000 spammer, troll, underage, and other assorted rule-breaking profiles. How many of these 20,000 banned members just simply set up fresh accounts Facebook didn’t say, although I’d estimate the number to be roughly almost 20,000 of them. If Facebook was banning 140,000 members weekly and each of them wasn’t coming back at all that would work out at 7,280,000 people dropping off the edge of the Facebook universe every year. But even assuming that those accounts just aren’t simply remade (in my experience they most certainly are) then that is still only a small percentage of the estimated fake profiles on Facebook.

The company bans underage accounts because it is by US law required to. I am sure that if Mark Zuckerberg could wave a magic wand and remove permanently all problem users who are more trouble than they are worth - such as RIP trolls and spammers - without fundamentally changing his site’s signup process then he would do so. It would though really be giving him the benefit of the doubt to say that he would genuinely like to remove all underage children until they are no longer underage just because the law demands it. He himself wants children younger than 13 to be allowed onto his application and is actively campaigning for a change in the law to allow that. That plus the fact that the profiles these underage kids operate have made him a lot of money while causing no serious PR problems leads me to believe that while his company does abide by the rules and bans underage kids which are reported to them, it may not mind all that much that there are still millions of them left on the site. Most of the normal trolls and other fake accounts on the system must easily have altogether brought in millions upon millions of dollars in revenue for his company and all without any noticeable trouble, so it would really be stretching the imagination to believe that he doesn’t want any of them at all around either; although now with the advertisers making negative noises about the amount of fake profiles, he may indeed be forced to really do something about it all.