Inside the minds of Internet trolls

[TheMightyFavog]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=login

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.”

(snip)

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.

It's stories like these that really make me weep for humanity at times. Later on in the story, where they actually interview some of these trolls (including a bit about some people who hacked an epilepsy foundation's website to make ti flash bright colors) is some stuff that will really shock you.

Now, I've been to 4chan, (mostly to peruse their anime, tabletop gaming and cooking boards) and I've been to the /b/ board there. I've seen things there that make you wonder if some of the people who post there have any shred of humanity at all. Racism is rampant, along with the kind of sick humor described above.

Some of the stuff I saw there actually inspired me to create a little image that sums up my feelings about the /b/ board:



How the hell did things get this bad? How?

[ColbertWatcher]

1. Now the New York Times discovers /b/?

I wonder what event has sparked this sudden interest by the GOP-controlled media in the place where LOLCats were born?

Why the sudden need to bash the 12-, 13-year olds that lurk in the bowels of 4chan? (Can you imagine the shock if they ever went to ebaums?)

Could if be that the New York Times has just now discovered the internets?

Has the venerable Gray Lady just now found out that pre-adolescent boys can be cruel and may on occasion make potty jokes?

Great investigation, New York Times. You've just discovered that children whose parents leave them unsupervised to go work three jobs to pay for overpriced housing and healthcare create their own virtual "Lord of the Flies". Now, why don't you do some real investigative journalism, or are you still looking for a CIA mole-replacement for Judith Miller?

BTW, JonathanChance, great macro! (Yet another thing 4chan has given the world.)

[TheMightyFavog]

4. Thanks, CW!

You know, my dabbling in /b/ in many ways reminded me of Apocalypse Now. Although not of that scene where Willard is told that he's in the asshole of the world. It reminded me of Kurtz's encampment.

[ColbertWatcher]

7. You're welcome.

I have very little experience with /b/, but I can say I've visited it (along with Something Awful, ED and eBaum).

Aside from an occasional targeting (like the one mentioned in the article), they're just kids vying for attention.

I really am surprised at The Times' sudden interest.

[tkmorris]

2. You really need to understand who these people are

Jean-Paul Sartre would understand them. Camus would TOTALLY get it. /b/ is populated by Existentialists. To them, life is absurd, and so are those who live it, including themselves. You really need to understand the way these people think before you offer any judgement about them. To them, the world they find themselves in, with all of it's rules, it's laws, it's accepted social niceties, it's all ridiculous. To be sure, many of them are simply hedonists, but the root core, the ones who drive the site and make it tick, are something different. It can be frightening in a Clockwork Orange kind of way, but it can be quite educational too if understanding that generation matters to you at all.

Ponder this. A great many of the LOLcats, motivational posters, and other internet memes originated on /b/. If you attack them for their crass indifference, you must acknowledge their brilliance as well.

[TheMightyFavog]

5. True, true.

Isn't this the same thing where the whole "anonymous" campaign against the Scientologists got started? One of the pictures in this article features a V mask that you see in pictures of their protests.

[tkmorris]

6. Yep. Anonymous IS /b/

Kinda funny too, because many of the old hand /b/ people thought that any sort of public campaign, such as the one against the Scientologists, went completely against the grain of what /b/ was supposed to be. To be "anonymous", and yet to publicly protest against anything, seemed hypocritical.

The argument rages on.

[spoony]

13. If the word brilliance were a sweater

I'm afraid it would have been ruined by your stretching its neck to make it accommodate such slightly amusing but ultimately minor accomplishments. And if the tradeoff for their not existing to cause pain to the family in the OP (and whatever similar nuisances they've made of themselves) was the absence of LOLcats, somehow I think society could manage to hold together. They aren't a generation, nor representative of one. They're just bored, poorly-parented brats, not bloody Kubricks.

[girl gone mad]

3. The internet is just awful.

quick, let's hurry back to the days when publications such as the New York Times controlled our access to information on current events and set the trends in culture.

:sarcasm:

[ColbertWatcher]

8. You know, the internets are a series of tubes...

...and some of those tubes are clogged with some of the most horrific sights and sounds ever seen by man.

Apparently, there is a rule (34, I think?) that says everything must be turned into porn. In fact, I believe that is one of the initiations into the troll gang: you must convert a pious image into porn.

I'm not sure where I heard that before, maybe it was on the internets.

[Frank Cannon]

9. Really, does this surprise anyone?

[ColbertWatcher]

10. But, how does that explain O'Reilly?

And Limbaugh and Coulter and Malkin?

And every other talking ass on FOX?

Perhaps the formula for cable TV "news reader" would read:

"Meglomaniac + White House Talking Points + cash, promises of job security in exchange for obedience + audience = Shitcock"?

Is that right, it's been years since I did word problems...

[Frank Cannon]

11. Those people are just assholes, period, and are well paid for it

The GIF theory explains how the Internet turns otherwise normal human beings into raving maniacs.

[ColbertWatcher]

12. True. n/t