NYT discovers Trolling. News conferences to get more exciting?

[Eric P]

August 3, 2008
Magazine Preview
Malwebolence
By MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ

article is huge:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

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.

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.

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.”

[Bocsius]

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.”

I don't know, jackhole, perhaps you needing a gun to protect you from the results of your internet trolling is a sign that maybe you should reexamine the priorities in your life.

And what those distinguished mentally-challenged fellows did with the Henderson suicide is disgusting. Man, I really hate the internet.

[bagofeyes]

Remember those embarrassing scientology protests? What a bunch of cocks.

[Kestastrophe]

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

You have to be kidding me. The Times actually used the Fox News definition of LOL. This has to be a troll in and of itself.

[Van Cruncheon]

i like how the craziest of the crazy is a lolbertarian eschatologist

[duckman2000]

Sooner or later, someone is going to be paid a visit by someone more irrational, cynical and resourceful than themselves. And then the rest will cry about how what they are doing is not serious, so why would anyone want to hurt them, oh my, cry cry. What's the term, simulation blindness? In this case, that would then refer to internet users who are far too wrapped up in their cocoons of anonymity and random anonymous attacks to realize that not everyone is going to respect this internet reality. You push the buttons, eventually something will go off.

[FlameOfCallandor]

Yeah this is pretty disgusting.

[APF]

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.”

Just FYI, this is not me.

[Tristam]

If what they say is true, if karma really is a bitch, this miserable fuck is going to get dp buttraped by Mandingo and Lex Steel (in public) while thousands of people videotape the event and post his bitchass crying all over the Internet. Eventually he'll explode from severely impacted bowels.

EDIT: I inaccurately connected Fortuny to whoever tormented the Hendersons following the kid's death, so maybe I can't get too riled up about him personally. But I'm willing to bet that if he's the de facto 4chan spokesman then he's responsible for equally fucked up shit.

[duckman2000]

Well, if we assume that the victims have insofar all been relatively gullible "internet n00bs," then these malicious characters behind the attacks are to the victims probably beyond both reach and comprehension. But say if the person targeted was a friend or a close family member of one us, then what safety net would these characters really enjoy?

I'm not sure how I would react if something like the dead kid affair happened in my family; I'm well aware of how people behave on the internet and that a good amount of cynicism and separation from reality is needed to deal with the more malicious scenarios, but at this point it'd be directly encroaching upon and affecting the very real lives of friends, family and subsequently myself. The only problem would be that a real, physical act of "vengeance" would not fall under the banner of anonymity and freedom from responsibility that these internet hooligans enjoy, so it'd have to be something far more elaborate.

[Kestastrophe]

The only problem would be that a real, physical act of "vengeance" would not fall under the banner of anonymity and freedom from responsibility that these internet hooligans enjoy, so it'd have to be something far more elaborate.

DOS attack on 4chan?

[duckman2000]

The only problem would be that a real, physical act of "vengeance" would not fall under the banner of anonymity and freedom from responsibility that these internet hooligans enjoy, so it'd have to be something far more elaborate.

DOS attack on 4chan?

I was thinking more along the lines of giving them a taste of their own medicine, so to speak. If anonymity is what enables them, then one would think that robbing them of that would be enough to get things rolling.

[Tristam]

Well, if we assume that the victims have insofar all been relatively gullible "internet n00bs," then these malicious characters behind the attacks are to the victims probably beyond both reach and comprehension. But say if the person targeted was a friend or a close family member of one us, then what safety net would these characters really enjoy?

I'm not sure how I would react if something like the dead kid affair happened in my family; I'm well aware of how people behave on the internet and that a good amount of cynicism and separation from reality is needed to deal with the more malicious scenarios, but at this point it'd be directly encroaching upon and affecting the very real lives of friends, family and subsequently myself. The only problem would be that a real, physical act of "vengeance" would not fall under the banner of anonymity and freedom from responsibility that these internet hooligans enjoy, so it'd have to be something far more elaborate.

Pretty much.

The only problem would be that a real, physical act of "vengeance" would not fall under the banner of anonymity and freedom from responsibility that these internet hooligans enjoy, so it'd have to be something far more elaborate.

DOS attack on 4chan?

I was thinking more along the lines of giving them a taste of their own medicine, so to speak. If anonymity is what enables them, then one would think that robbing them of that would be enough to get things rolling.

The Scarlet 'B'?

[Brehvolution]

Jesus H......

[demi]

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.”

Just FYI, this is not me.

I wish it was me

[APF]

Wasn't that a local Fox affiliate?  Not the same thing as FNC.

[laesperanzapaz]

i still remember that brief clip of fox report, a dark yellow van blowing up

like wat