Hackers on Steroids (32 page)

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 10
th
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 23
rd
, 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 groups generate says why they probably won’t bother to. The circus will keep coming to new towns and cities on its never-ending tour.

I don’t think young kids can truly comprehend what their deaths will mean, nor do they really understand that a bully can only have real psychological power over you if you let it. Much of this book is about trying to show the bullies and the psychopaths as they really are. I think that if those being tormented by cyberabusers can start to understand what lies behind the masks of those abusers, then they might find it all a good bit easier to deal with. No one becomes an Internet bully because they are powerful and strong and beautiful and happy. If you can see your cyberabuser – anonymous or not - as like a Jessica Cook or a Sean Duffy, do they still look so terrible and scary and impossible to deal with? Make a joke of them and suddenly they may start to seem a lot less threatening. Humour is a powerful way of coping with the bad things and bad people in life.

Of course, many of these trolls have been bullied too and are trying to regain lost self-esteem by themselves becoming the tormentors, the vicious circle that drives many of the abused to become in turn the abuser. Saying that, it would take a much better person than I am to extend sympathy to RIP trolls. I’ve witnessed a couple of such talking on Facebook of being suicidal. I told both of them to go right ahead, and I meant it. If you think that makes me as bad as them I don’t care because just bear in mind that it is the likes of they who are driving innocent people to take their own lives. I’d rather see thousands of the psychopaths being put into the cold ground than one real human being. You look at the already dead eyes and listen to the monotone voice of a 14-year-old Hunter Mello in a video that used to exist on Youtube, and you try for a moment to understand the obvious mental torture that Paul Baloney toils his whole life under, and you think of Colm Coss and his spells in mental hospitals and his claimed suicide attempts; but then you think of the mentally handicapped man whom over 100 psycho-trolls conspired to try and drive to suicide ‘for the lulz,’ and the words of Darren Burton when asked as to his thoughts on the pain he inflicts on grieving families return to your mind. Fuck ‘um indeed. Fuck ‘um all. I’m a firm believer in treating everyone with the exact amount of respect that they show most of the rest of the world, and so thus I have no heart at all when it comes to RIP trolls.  

New psycho-trolls are constantly taking their places at the banquet of the damned on the Internet, determined to reach their claws into vulnerable people’s lives and let the world see that they are now the ones to be feared. The Internet is the great equalizer, and through it every day the living dead of 4Chan are getting their revenge on the world. And it is, without doubt, the cult of 4Chan that has encouraged so much of this ‘anything goes’ culture to be found across much of the Web. I can’t find evidence of an RIP trolling subculture in non-English-speaking countries: Christopher Poole and his site have a lot to answer for. As I finish this book, the media is reporting on the latest wild and wacky stunt from those loveable rogues on /b/, one that aims to get young girls to cut themselves in protest at the alleged weed-smoking of singer Justin Bieber. ‘Lets start a cut yourself for bieber campaign. Tweet a bunch of pics of people cutting themselves and claim we did it because bieber was smoking weed. See if we can get little girls to cut themselves,’ went the original post, quickly followed by a reply expressing ‘Brilliant.’ Then it spread to Twitter with a concerted and well-organised effort being undertaken to make ‘#cutforbieber’ a trending hashtag on the site.

You wouldn’t believe – or perhaps by now you would believe – at how upset many of these ultimately needy and psychologically and emotionally delicate psycho-trolls get at being compared to paedophiles. Yeah, fair enough. And I apologise. One group preys on the most vulnerable and innocent people they can find in order to gratify the sadistic yearnings they have inside of themselves, and the other group are paedophiles.

And speaking of paedophiles, now that Facebook is a public company with shareholders from all across the globe, isn’t it time that they shed a little bit more light on what they are doing at the moment and what if anything they are planning to do in future about the child pornography trading going on within its cyber walls? Since I wrote chapter six, a report has appeared in a British newspaper in which a Ceop police officer said that Facebook is now working well with them. That’s great, it truly is, but are Facebook also working well with the anti-paedophile squads in France, and Japan, and Germany, and Brazil, and Spain, and South Africa, and Argentina, and all the other countries? We need to be told. Always remember that on the Internet, we’re all from the same little village.

Ordinary people on the Internet continue to hunt for paedophiles and psychos, with mixed results. Some of these people seem to think you can tell a paedo just by looking at him, which may be a little bit worrying if they can get people as stupid as they are to listen to them (and they can, oh they can). An Internet mob can sometimes have a special kind of stupidity about it. ‘Dey ony be all nonces wit fear in there hearts mate. String em fookin nonces up fer dats all dey hav too be mate!’ were the exact words of one contributor to an anti-paedophile Facebook page, the ‘nonces’ in question being some people who had questioned the running of the page. And when that man isn’t busy foaming on the Internet, he’s out smashing the windows of paediatricians. I remember one exceedingly angry and exceedingly stupid man accusing me of being a paedophile and screaming that he had just put ‘Mike Lonston’ onto an online paedo watch list. The proof of my noncery: I had messaged his 23-year-old wife on Facebook to warn her that trolls were up to something regarding her, and all while using a picture of the planet Saturn as my avatar. ‘Messaging young girls without their permission and he has no picture of himself!’ was his charge against me. Hilarious, I thought, but it just goes to show.

But mobocracy is what thrives in the cyber pandemonium that comes when all law has broken down and little Internet demagogues arise to fill their egos with fantasies of power. I remember one supposed anti-troll by the name of ‘Tazzman’ Dalton. This little man with his little mind and existing in his little world was actually sad enough to become envious of me and some other anti-trolls because we were seen to be outing the real identities of some hitherto anonymous RIP trollers, something Dalton had been trying and failing in hilarious ways to do for quite a while. Whenever some of whom he liked to think of as his underlings then joined up with us he took vengeance upon them by doxing them to the RIP trolls, and then just for good measure telling those same trolls about some young family members of theirs that had been lost to suicide.