[English] trolls and lulz and jason and lori

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

www.nytimes.com
Magazine Preview, this article will appear in this Sunday's Times Magazine.

 Malwebolence

By MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ
Published: August 3, 2008

One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew 
him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took 
a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and 
shot himself in the head. 

The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin 
mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and 
garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an hero to 
take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it 
back. . . . ” 

Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell’s newspaper obituary to 
MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. 

>From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell’s page came to the attention of an Internet 
message board known as /b/ and the “trolls,” as they have come to be 
called, who dwell there.

/b/ is the designated “random” board of 4chan.org, a group of message 
boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. 

A post consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts 
as “anonymous.” In effect, this makes /b/ a panopticon in reverse — nobody 
can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak from the center. The 
anonymous denizens of 4chan’s other boards (devoted to travel, fitness and 
several genres of pornography) refer to the /b/-dwellers as “/b/tards.”

Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, 
the culture of /b/ has little precedent. 

/b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene 
telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with 
slang that you are too old to understand. 

Something about Mitchell Henderson struck the denizens of /b/ as funny. 

They were especially amused by a reference on his MySpace page to a lost 
iPod. Mitchell Henderson, /b/ decided, had killed himself over a lost 
iPod. The “an hero” meme was born. Within hours, the anonymous multitudes 
were wrapping the tragedy of Mitchell’s death in absurdity.

Someone hacked Henderson’s MySpace page and gave him the face of a zombie. 

Someone placed an iPod on Henderson’s grave, took a picture and posted it 
to /b/. Henderson’s face was appended to dancing iPods, spinning iPods, 
hardcore porn scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of Henderson’s demise 
appeared on YouTube, complete with shattered iPod. 

The phone began ringing at Mitchell’s parents’ home. “It sounded like 
kids,” remembers Mitchell’s father, Mark Henderson, a 44-year-old I.T. 
executive. “They’d say, ‘Hi, this is Mitchell, I’m at the cemetery.’ ‘Hi, 
I’ve got Mitchell’s iPod.’ ‘Hi, I’m Mitchell’s ghost, the front door is 
locked. Can you come down and let me in?’ ” He sighed. “It really got to 
my wife.” The calls continued for a year and a half.

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote 
someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. 

Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, 
single-topic Usenet groups. 

The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls 
a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise 
to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this 
stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to 
trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”

Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a 
mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. 

Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; 
escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for 
their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be 
Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes 
for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen. 

Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.

“Lulz” is how trolls keep score. A corruption of “LOL” or “laugh out 
loud,” “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium. 

“Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles 
away while you chat with friends and laugh,” said one ex-troll who, like 
many people I contacted, refused to disclose his legal identity.

Another troll explained the lulz as a quasi-thermodynamic exchange between 
the sensitive and the cruel: “You look for someone who is full of it, a 
real blowhard. Then you exploit their insecurities to get an insane amount 
of drama, laughs and lulz. Rules would be simple: 1. Do whatever it takes 
to get lulz. 2. Make sure the lulz is widely distributed. This will allow 
for more lulz to be made. 3. The game is never over until all the lulz 
have been had.”

/b/ is not all bad. 4chan has tried (with limited success) to police 
itself, using moderators to purge child porn and eliminate calls to 
disrupt other sites. Among /b/’s more interesting spawn is Anonymous, a 
group of masked pranksters who organized protests at Church of Scientology 
branches around the world.

But the logic of lulz extends far beyond /b/ to the anonymous message 
boards that seem to be springing up everywhere. Two female Yale Law School 
students have filed a suit against pseudonymous users who posted violent 
fantasies about them on AutoAdmit, a college-admissions message board. In 
China, anonymous nationalists are posting death threats against pro-Tibet 
activists, along with their names and home addresses. Technology, 
apparently, does more than harness the wisdom of the crowd. It can 
intensify its hatred as well.

Malwebolence. Published: August 3, 2008 (Page 2 of 7)

Jason Fortuny might be the closest thing this movement of anonymous 
provocateurs has to a spokesman. Thirty-two years old, he works “typical 
Clark Kent I.T.” freelance jobs — Web design, programming — but his 
passion is trolling, “pushing peoples’ buttons.” Fortuny frames his acts 
of trolling as “experiments,” sociological inquiries into human behavior.

In the fall of 2006, he posted a hoax ad on Craigslist, posing as a woman 
seeking a “str8 brutal dom muscular male.” More than 100 men responded. 

Fortuny posted their names, pictures, e-mail and phone numbers to his 
blog, dubbing the exposé “the Craigslist Experiment.” This made Fortuny 
the most prominent Internet villain in America until November 2007, when 
his fame was eclipsed by the Megan Meier MySpace suicide. Meier, a 13-year-
old Missouri girl, hanged herself with a belt after receiving cruel 
messages from a boy she’d been flirting with on MySpace. 

The boy was not a real boy, investigators say, but the fictional creation 
of Lori Drew, the mother of one of Megan’s former friends. Drew later said 
she hoped to find out whether Megan was gossiping about her daughter. The 
story — respectable suburban wife uses Internet to torment teenage girl — 
was a media sensation. 

 Post a Comment at The Medium Fortuny’s Craigslist Experiment deprived its 
subjects of more than just privacy. Two of them, he says, lost their jobs, 
and at least one, for a time, lost his girlfriend. Another has filed an 
invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against Fortuny in an Illinois court. After 
receiving death threats, Fortuny meticulously scrubbed his real address 
and phone number from the Internet. “Anyone who knows who and where you 
are is a security hole,” he told me. “I own a gun. I have an escape route. 
If someone comes, I’m ready.”

While reporting this article, I did everything I could to verify the 
trolls’ stories and identities, but I could never be certain. 

After all, I was examining a subculture that is built on deception and 
delights in playing with the media. If I had doubts about whether Fortuny 
was who he said he was, he had the same doubts about me. I first contacted 
Fortuny by e-mail, and he called me a few days later. “I checked you out,” 
he said warily. “You seem legitimate.” We met in person on a bright spring 
day at his apartment, on a forested slope in Kirkland, Wash., near 
Seattle. He wore a T-shirt and sweat pants, looking like an amiable 
freelancer on a Friday afternoon. He is thin, with birdlike features and 
the etiolated complexion of one who works in front of a screen. He’d been 
chatting with an online associate about driving me blindfolded from the 
airport, he said. “We decided it would be too much work.”

A flat-screen HDTV dominated Fortuny’s living room, across from a futon 
prepped with neatly folded blankets. This was where I would sleep for the 
next few nights. As Fortuny picked up his cat and settled into an Eames-
style chair, I asked whether trolling hurt people. “I’m not going to sit 
here and say, ‘Oh, God, please forgive me!’ so someone can feel better,” 
Fortuny said, his calm voice momentarily rising. The cat lay purring in 
his lap. “Am I the bad guy? Am I the big horrible person who shattered 
someone’s life with some information? No! This is life. Welcome to life. 
Everyone goes through it. I’ve been through horrible stuff, too.”

“Like what?” I asked. Sexual abuse, Fortuny said. When Jason was 5, he 
said, he was molested by his grandfather and three other relatives. 
Jason’s mother later told me, too, that he was molested by his 
grandfather. The last she heard from Jason was a letter telling her to 
kill herself. “Jason is a young man in a great deal of emotional pain,” 
she said, crying as she spoke. “Don’t be too harsh. He’s still my son.”

In the days after the Megan Meier story became public, Lori Drew and her 
family found themselves in the trolls’ crosshairs. 

Their personal information — e-mail addresses, satellite images of their 
home, phone numbers — spread across the Internet. One of the numbers led 
to a voice-mail greeting with the gleeful words “I did it for the lulz.” 

Anonymous malefactors made death threats and hurled a brick through the 
kitchen window. Then came the Megan Had It Coming blog. Supposedly written 
by one of Megan’s classmates, the blog called Megan a “drama queen,” so 
unstable that Drew could not be blamed for her death. “Killing yourself 
over a MySpace boy? Come on!!! I mean yeah your fat so you have to take 
what you can get but still nobody should kill themselves over it.” In the 
third post the author revealed herself as Lori Drew .. (end page 2/7)

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Cheers people
Stephen Loosley
Victoria Australia