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Troll Hunting

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Troll Hunting For my father, Brian, who taught me to love wor ds. Hell is empty, and all the devils are here. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2 THIS IS A work of nonfiction, researched and documented to the best of my ability. There were significant security risks in writing this book. I sought expert advice and wrote according to it. Therefore, some of the trolling syndicates mentioned within these pages have been given pseudonyms or go unnamed. Likewise, some of the trolls themselves are discussed only with a pseudonym. A few of the trolls who spoke to me behind the scenes are not named at all and others are composites or have been segmented. Some readers may be critical of the decision to provide anonymity for people who are hurting others so much. However, sometimes access to information comes at a cost – and, all things being equal, the trolls gave me great access. By the same token, some predator-troll victims are in physical danger. This is especially true where domestic violence is involved. In those cases, names and other identifying details may have been altered but the facts of the stories are unchanged. I have worked hard to quote all interviewees verbatim, but for the sake of readability have corrected some spelling errors and syntax. When I’m messaging with trolls in the United States, I use Australian spelling and they use American spelling. For authenticity, I’ve left this as is. This is a book about the internet and how it bleeds into real life. When quoting links and screenshots, I’ve aimed for accuracy. However, the internet is not a static beast. Some posts have changed or disappeared in the time since I started writing. There’s something else. Trolls frequently use language that is designed to shock. It can be deeply offensive, as can their actions. This book invites you to look harder and think harder. If words were neutral, people wouldn’t use them like this. Words are a weapon – and a gateway to much greater harm. – Ginger Contents Cover Page Title Page Preface Part 1: Trolls 1 The paedophiles, the trolls and the journalist 2 WTF is trolling? 3 Meet the trolls 4 When the flowers grow funny 5 You are literally the enemy Notes in the margins: What the fuck did you expect? Part 2: Targets 6 She was asking for it 7 Misogyny on the internet 8 Deep in the grey 9 Your demons are omnipresent 10 Not much cop 11 Champions of free speech controlling the message Notes in the margins: White women are cancer Part 3: Troll hunting 12 Hunting a terrorist troll 13 The internet was my parent 14 White men at the centre 15 A professional racist Notes in the margins: The hardest conversation of all Conclusion: Reaching back across the cold water Endnotes Acknowledgements Copyright Page Preface 12 December 2017 As a compulsive social media checker, I can’t help it: I click on the Twitter notification straight away. Even after all this time, the sight of his name makes my skin prickle. This is ‘Mark’, the vicious and committed internet troll. He’s a member of an international online syndicate that tries to harm people and wreck their lives. They document all their exploits on their website. We’ve been in contact for a couple of years now. He’ll go quiet for a while and then suddenly there he is again, trying to reel me in. This time he’s sent me a link to a CNN story.1 It’s about William Atchison, a 21-year-old man who shot and killed two teenagers – Casey Jordan Marquez and Francisco Fernandez – in a New Mexico school a few days earlier. Atchison died at the scene from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. ‘One of my admins was the shooter,’ Mark writes. He’s involved in running a trolling-related wiki and so, apparently, was Atchison. A familiar, creeping anxiety sits low in my stomach. According to Mark himself, trolls lie and their game is to hurt you. Staying calm is the only tool I’ve got; predator trolls like Mark can sense your fear. With artificial steadiness, I reply, ‘Prove it.’ He sends me another link. It contains reams of information about the shooter and his miserable online life. It’s encyclopaedic: photos of Atchison as an adult and also as a sweet-faced, freckled kid. In one photo he’s with a black-and-white cat and in another he’s with a curly haired spaniel. The pet images are dated July 2008. Atchison would have been twelve years old. He liked animals and somehow this makes the slaughter harder to believe. The link includes the shooter’s birthdate, email addresses, his dozens of online usernames and profiles, his IP address and the time and date he last logged on to this forum. His exact location – latitude and longitude – are listed. There are links to his bigoted, hopeless rants and endless ‘jokes’ and memes about the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. I’m scanning the links and threads, looking for something. I’m not sure what until I find it; a sketch of his world: How am I supposed to function in this world? Wherever I go, I see degeneracy. Pointless materialism, hedonism, sexual decay, dirty niggers who do nothing but slowly break down this society etc. it’s fucking everywhere. No way to escape it, 99% of people are part of it and whatever I do I am confronted with the death of the West. Go to the store to buy groceries in peace? Nope here’s a group of LGBT liberal filth in line with you. And there’s a nigger family with 10 kids over there. And a Finn too, but he’s overweight as fuck and he’s buying alcohol and shit junk food. Fucking fantastic. I used to think that this was a phase and we’d get over it but I have now come to realise that I was born into a literal dystopia. I’m fighting off a suffocating sadness. How did this kid come to be so filled with hate? Why didn’t anyone help him before he became a killer? Clicking and scrolling. Clicking and scrolling. Then I’m staring at a photo of one of the victims. Casey Jordan Marquez’s floral skirt has caught the wind and she’s smiling. She’s so young. In his photo, Francisco Fernandez’s hands are clasped together and he’s smiling too – as if he knows something you don’t.2 These kids are in the morgue now. Their parents may well be visiting their bodies as Mark and I correspond. The police seemed unaware of Atchison’s plans. Sheriff Ken Christensen from the New Mexico State Police said, ‘It’s just a shame that he [Atchison] wasn’t on our radar. I don’t think he had as much as a traffic ticket or anything else here locally … I don’t think that we know so far that anyone else knew of his intentions.’3 But Mark and his trolling buddies knew. One of the trolls on the forum where Atchison’s details are posted writes: ‘Maybe we should have actually said something instead of laughing at him about it for years lol.’ The ‘laugh out loud’ is deftly placed, right at the end of the sentence so that any regret is negated: No, we shouldn’t have done anything, except what we did do – nothing. The ‘lol’ means this is for laughs. Or ‘lulz’, as the trolls like to say. Another person on the forum writes, ‘Rest in piss’, and a third poster describes Atchison as ‘an hero’. For the unanointed, ‘an hero’ in trolling culture is anyone who dies by suicide. It sometimes comes with the added implication that the person was somehow incompetent.4 In some detail, Mark describes Atchison’s obsession with mass shootings. ‘His entire life revolved around talking about the Columbine school shooting,’ he explains. Then, a few moments later: ‘I just saw what he was posting and talking about and knew it was only a matter of time.’ ‘You wouldn’t report that to the police?’ I ask, knowing he’d never report something like this. Predictably, he replies, ‘I’m not going to report something like that because it doesn’t bother me but if someone had asked me I would have told them that he was a threat.’ The FBI had interviewed Atchison, along with members of his family, in March 2016 after he made some alarming comments on a gaming forum about mass shootings. But as the would-be killer hadn’t yet committed a crime, they were obliged to let him go. During a press conference with New Mexico police, FBI agent Terry Wade recalled: ‘We did conduct an interview with him at his home and we talked to him extensively. He was cooperative. At that time he didn’t have any guns … he told us that he enjoyed trolling on the internet …’ At this point in our conversation Mark senses an opportunity. ‘Tbh [to be honest] I’m disappointed he aimed so high and for so long but only managed 2 [victims].’ Two years earlier, when Mark and I first came into contact, a comment like this would have enraged me to the point of lashing out. He knows this much about me, but perhaps doesn’t realise I’ve changed since then. He’s still trying. Still pushing to get a rise.
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