A special investigation into the dark world of trolling

[jimmy olsen]

Lulz! 

pics are embedded in the original article.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/it-just-makes-me-happy-when-i-can-make-someone-angry-a-special-investigation-into-the-dark-world-of-trolling/story-e6frfro0-1226278282934#ixzz1nmCf9pQE

'It just makes me happy when I can make someone angry' - A special investigation into the dark world of trolling

By Claire Connelly
news.com.au
February 28, 2012 12:10PM

BEN spends up to 70 hours a week on the internet getting high on other people's anger and despair.

The unemployed 19-year-old from Victoria - who spoke to news.com.au on the condition of anonymity - doesn't go out much and doesn't have many real friends, but he doesn't feel alone. He believes he's part of a community of similar-minded people who scour the web looking for pages to vandalise and lives to upset.

Ben (not his real name) first started trolling in 2008 on the online forum 4Chan.

His first act was innocuous enough: he weighed in on a discussion about religion and claimed to have disproved everything people had written.

Since then his trolling has become more vicious and destructive.

"It just makes me happy when I can make someone angry. It sounds weird but I kind of feed off their anger. The angrier I can get them, the better I feel," he told news.com.au.

Meet the trolls part II: So who do you think invented LOLcats?

He usually only trolls a post or website once before moving, not out of any sense of decency, but because he is scared of being arrested.

He said the worst thing he ever did was vandalise the Facebook memorial page of a young girl who had committed suicide. "I wrote, 'How's it hanging guys'."

He doesn't feel any remorse, and strangely doesn't consider his actions bullying despite claiming he probably wouldn't have started trolling if he had not been bullied at school.

IT'S HOT IN HELL

"I'd feel responsible but I wouldn't care. I've pretty much lost all hope for humanity anyway, I don't believe that anything can save people," he said.

Ben and the hundreds of thousands like him reflect the dark side of the internet. They believe themselves to be cultural critics, indulging in harmless fun, but RIP trolling is one of the most destructive and harmful forms of trolling. It mocks and exploits the pain of those grieving the loss of loved ones. It ranges from the sort of distasteful comment Ben posted to plastering pages with photoshopped pictures of babies in meat grinders or hardcore pornography.

Last year Bradley Paul Hampson became the first Australian to be jailed for it. He plastered the Facebook tribute pages of two slain schoolchildren with child pornography, an act the judge described as depraved.

In the UK, one of the most infamous RIP trolls, Sean Duffy, was sentenced several months later for persecuting on Facebook four families of dead children. On one girl's memorial page he wrote: "Help me mummy, It's hot in Hell."

But trollers like Ben and Hampson may not be just hurting their victims.

Cyber-researcher Karyn Krawford claims that extreme trolling may be a sign of mental ill-health.

Ms Krawford said she had done studies which showed the empathy of mental health sufferers decreased for every hour they spent online.

LACKING EMPATHY

"This lack of empathy caused people to become emotionally immune and desensitised to images they're not seeing in real life," she said.

In one study, subjects displayed a complete lack of empathy when shown images of people dying. "They couldn't see how much that person was hurting; they couldn't see the cut off arm or the pain and distress and terror.

"As a consequence they were able to make these remarks and express these bullying type behaviours."

Twenty-three-year-old stay-at-home mother Sarah, from South Australia, is one such bully. For years she limited her trolling to snarky posts on the parenting website BabyMama.org, reserving her vitriol for discussions about breastfeeding and vaccinations.

But last month her actions spiralled out of control and she started actively bullying other users. Sarah set up a Facebook page belittling another mother that had posted near naked pictures of herself on the website.

"She started getting negative replies and deleted the pictures but I saved the pictures and uploaded them to a Facebook group where she was humiliated," she said.

Sarah quickly apologised and deleted the photos after other users criticised her actions and the site threatened her with expulsion.

"I randomly targeted a lady for no reason, humiliated her for no reason - just to be a bitch. Looking back now it was petty. I'm one of those remorseful trolls, I suppose."

Sarah, like Ben, attributed her trolling to years of bullying she suffered at school. "I dropped out of school in year nine," she said. "I suppose I'm an asshole to people because I'm carrying all this spitefulness around with me. I hurt people."

Sydney student James admits he has problems switching from the "vicious but joking troll" persona on gaming sites to "James the nice guy" elsewhere.

"On gaming sites, if you don't troll you're pretty much seen as someone who is sucking up to the site moderators," he said.

And he has no shame when it comes to trolling. "If the person I was trolling was from a poorer area, maybe I'd say something like 'How does it feel having no future knowing you're from that area'," he said.

"It's just my mentality to make it personal and a lot of people take things way too seriously – especially on social networking sites."

POWER OF THE WEAKLING

Psychologists have long attributed bad behaviour online to "deindividuation" - the feeling people get when they think they are anonymous.

"Social distance can cause a 55-year-old climate change sceptic with a job and a mortgage to behave like a spastic donkey with strange malicious behaviour," said researcher James Heathers, of the University of Sydney.

He said the quality of online conversations in general seemed to be worsening by the day, and had now turned into a competition to see who can yell "urrgggh lame" the loudest.

"There's no turn-taking, or reacting like there is in face-to-face communication," he said. "The conversational structure is completely broken and there's no thoughtful consideration of issues."

Psychiatrist Dr Tanveer Ahmed said people who troll may well feel a sense of regret, guilt or shame afterwards but mostly they rationalise their behaviour.

"It's a bit like the day after a big party - a part of you could be filled with regret but most of you is like, 'I was off my face, I'm giving myself a pass'."

He said that people don't feel the need to moderate their behaviour when they were online.

"The ability to say 'hi how's it going' to people we dislike helps us function in society, but that facade isn't required online and often the first thoughts that come to mind – thoughts that would be unacceptable in other forums – are the first ones we bang up into a comment section on the web."

He said a sense of power was important to how people behaved online. "You're far more likely to be a troll if you're a relative weakling elsewhere," he said.

"The internet is kind of a Wizard of Oz type setting, where people can feel big, whereas in another social setting they can be, well, pissheads frankly."

MEET THE TROLLS

BEN

- "It just makes me happy when I can make someone angry. It sounds weird but I kind of feed off their anger. The angrier I can get them, the better I feel. I'd feel responsible but I wouldn't care. I've pretty much lost all hope for humanity anyway, I don't believe that anything can save people."

SARAH

- "I randomly targeted a lady for no reason, humiliated her for no reason - just to be a bitch. Looking back now it was petty.. I'm one of those remorseful trolls."

JAMES

- "On gaming sites, if you don't troll you're pretty much seen as someone who is sucking up to the site moderators. It's just my mentality to make it personal and a lot of people take things way too seriously – especially on social networking sites."

Meet the trolls part II: So who do you think invented LOLcats?

LOL. LULZ. Amazeballs. LOLcats.

All invented by trolls. Yes, trolls.

Because not all trolling is the same, and not everyone trolls for the same reason.

At one end of the spectrum you have the cyber bullies and the hate-mongers, people who get high on taunting the families of dead children.

At the other, you have people posting pictures of cuddly, adorable kittens with funny captions on them.

Experts claim that trolling can be a force for good, that it enriches the internet daily and can improve the way we communicate. Even the sick side, they argue, can shine a light on how social media works.

Stefan Krappitz, an expert on trolling and the author of Troll Culture: A Comprehensive Guide, believes trolls' contribution to the internet has been undervalued.

"Trolling is fun," Krappitz told news.com.au. "The internet is a playground. Don't let anybody tell you something else!

"Trolling is simply a part of culture that deserves more respect. By infiltrating systems, trolls spark a discourse on how to make things different."

Trolls are responsible for the creation of new words, many of which have entered into common use.

"Conversation on the internet has developed its own subculture specific languages," Krappitz said.

Words trolls have contributed include "Lulz", which means "just for fun", "LOL", which is an anagram for "laugh out loud", and "Amazeballs", which doesn't need explaining.

Dr Axel Bruns, associate professor of creative industries and social media research at Queensland University of Technology, claims trolling is an "art form similar to the radical situationist artistic movements of the early 20th Century".

"Trolling is a kind of radical experiment with the boundaries of what you can do online."

The largest collection of "troll-art" is housed by infamous web forum 4Chan.

"On 4Chan they have these weird and wonderful conversations that are quite abstract and random and weird, but by doing that they are inventing memes and developing things that have been widely adopted across the internet," Dr Bruns said.

However, these art forms shouldn't be used to excuse unacceptable behaviour.

For every accomplished troll there are hundreds more who enjoy disrupting the web for disruption's sake. But even these trolls served a purpose, Dr Bruns said.

"On the internet there's always a tendency to say, 'I don't agree with you so you must be stupid'," he said.

But trolls do actually give something back to the pockets of people on the internet who spend all their time online talking about how right they are.

"The trolling can actually be quite healthy," Dr Bruns said. "That troll is actually doing a service. They inform them, try to get information through to them.

"But yet the people who are there who all share similar views might still see you as a troll simply because you present an opposing view."

In some cases, trolling is not only acceptable, it is encouraged.

"If you end up disrupting a pro-whaling discussion group, or a white supremacist site - technically you are going there to disrupt that board...but I imagine a lot of people would have sympathy for that," Dr Bruns said.

One such troll is Peter Gross, who poses on Twitter as a very, very racist wallaby. He said he set up the account, @RacistWallaby, as a way to cope with racist attitudes in his workplace.

"It got me thinking about racism and offensiveness in general, and how absurd it can get," he said.

"I got so frustrated that I tried to think of the most offensive, reputation-damaging tweets that could be issued through Twitter."

He said his proudest moment was getting Malcolm Turnbull to issue a public apology for insulting squirrels.

Australia's most famous troll, David Thorne, who became an overnight sensation after he tried to pay for a bill with a drawing of a seven-legged spider, told news.com.au he trolled to "encourage argument, discussion and factions based around humour" rather than simply to offend.

The 40-year-old graphic designer from Adelaide said they were other benefits to trolling. His online activities had earned him a small fortune - "a New York Times bestseller listing, a Range Rover, and a house with a pool, solid gold deck chairs and cups carved from solid diamond".

Even the site most associated with the worst excesses of the internet, 4Chan, has its defenders. Andres Monroy-Hernandez, fellow at the Berkman Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard University, said contrary to popular opinion, most of the people on 4Chan weren't there to attack or humiliate.

"They mostly share funny pictures and engage in highly creative collaborative work," he said.

Professor Monroy-Hernandez said that the most popular memes were created by anonymous communities on 4Chan. And not for fame, or money, just for the Lulz.

"Some of those memes have taken a life of their own and have even turned into discursive tools for political discussion," he said.

Trolling can be used to communicate thoughts and feelings that people typically wouldn't feel comfortable with, such as racism or child safety.

One of the most controversial memes the internet can thank trolls for is Pedobear, a cartoon mascot that critiques the culture of fear.

"On the one hand you can read it as a joke that trivialises a serious issue, but on other hand you can understand that Pedobear pokes fun of what some people might perceive as an exaggerated fear that the internet is a place where child predators are hiding," Professor Monroy-Hernandez said.

Pedobear's presence on a website can also signal to site moderators that some content may be illegal or inappropriate.
For example, Pedobear was photoshopped into an advert by French fashion label La Redoute that featured four young children on a beach and a naked man in the background. La Redoute removed the advert but not before the Pedobear image and countless others like it went viral.

Professor Monroy-Hernandez warned against knee-jerk responses to trolling.

"Making fun of others, in-jokes, witty commentary are as old as human culture - and so is the outrage that results from it," he said.

"New technologies have always caused outrage. With telephones, people were afraid it was going to corrupt the minds of women - who would more easily cheat on their husbands."

Rather than casting stones, people should try to understand trolling in order to be a better "netizen" - citizen of the web.

"It would make you a better informed person and a savvy consumer of information," he said.

[Razgovory]

I wonder if Grumbler feels remorse.

[garbon]

I hope they were trolling when interviewed for this article.

[Siege]

Trolling is so 2010.