The Dark Net Read online

  Flaming on BBS

  In 1978, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess invented the dial-up Bulletin Board System. With a modem, telephone and computer, anyone could either set up or connect to a ‘BBS’ and post messages. From the early 1980s onwards, BBS was many people’s first experience of life online.

  Within a year, insulting strangers on boards became a widely acknowledged and accepted part of BBS. Finger and Header Group disputes were more often than not heated debates between academics. But here, people started joining groups and boards with the sole purpose of starting an argument. This was called ‘flaming’: provoking strangers, disrupting other groups and creating tension for the fun of it. The best ‘flames’ were well written: subtle, clever and biting. Good flamers (who would often post under a pseudonym) built a reputation; people would eagerly await their posts, and archive their best lines. This was more than simple nastiness. For many flamers, it was an opportunity to experiment, to push boundaries, and to have their efforts read and appraised. One prominent flamer even published a guide – ‘Otto’s 1985 Guide to Flaming on BBS’ – advising potential flamers that being as controversial as possible was ‘the only way that people will read your opinions’. ‘It is very hard’, Otto wrote, ‘to ignore a board-wide or NET-wide flame war.’

  Dedicated groups started to appear to discuss how to most effectively flame others. In 1987, one BBS user called Joe Talmadge posted another guide, the ‘12 Commandments of Flaming’, to help flamers old and new develop their style:

  Commandment 12: When in doubt, insult. If you forget the other 11 rules, remember this one. At some point during your wonderful career as a Flamer you will undoubtedly end up in a flame war with someone who is better than you . . . At this point, there’s only one thing to do: INSULT THE DIRTBAG!!! ‘Oh yeah? Well, your mother does strange things with vegetables.’

  BBS groups were controlled by a systems operator (sysop), who had the power to invite or ban users, and delete flames before they reached the victim. Often labelled censorsops, they were themselves the targets of a nasty strand of flaming called ‘abusing’. Abusers would torment the sysop with insults, spam or anything else they could think of. Sometimes abusers and flamers would ‘crash’ a board with bugs, or post links to Trojan viruses disguised as pirated arcade games for unsuspecting users to download. Another trick was to upload messages referring to pirating, in order to direct snooping authorities towards the unsuspecting sysop.

  Usenet Flame Wars

  Around the same time that the BBS was invented, two academics at Duke University set themselves an even more ambitious task. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis were aggrieved that the Arpanet was elite and expensive – access cost approximately $100,000 per year – so in 1979 they set up a new network called ‘Usenet’, which, they hoped, anyone could access and use. (Anyone, that is, who had a computer connected to the operating system UNIX, which amounted to very few people.)

  Usenet, it can be argued, is the birthplace of the modern troll. Usenetters – a small clutch of academics, students, Arpanauts and computer nerds – would take a pseudonym and join a ‘newsgroup’ full of strangers. Like BBS, anyone could start a Usenet group, but unlike BBS the administrators – the people who ran the whole network – had some control over which groups they would allow. The hope of harmony reigning was dashed almost immediately. Usenetters clashed with the haughty Arpanauts over How Things Should Be Done in this new space, with the Arpanauts declaring the new Usenet ‘trash’ to be ignorant and inexperienced. One simple spelling mistake would often instigate a chain reaction, resulting in months of users trading insults and picking apart each other’s posts.

  Usenetters were a rebellious bunch. In 1987, Usenet administrators forced what became known as the ‘Great Renaming’, categorising all the haphazard groups into seven ‘hierarchies’. These were: comp.* (computing), misc.* (miscellaneous), news.*, rec.* (recreation), sci.* (science), soc.* (social) and talk.* – under which users could start their own relevant subgroups. To name the group, you took the main hierarchy name, and then added further categories.fn2* John Gilmore, who would go on to co-found the cypherpunk movement with Tim May and Eric Hughes in 1992, wanted to start a group about drugs, called rec.drugs. His request was turned down by the administrators.

  So Gilmore and two experienced Usenetters created their own hierarchy, which would be free of censorship. They called it alt.*, short for alternative (it was also thought to stand for ‘anarchists, lunatics and terrorists’). Flaming became extremely popular on alt.*, and flamers would take pleasure in being cruel to other users in as creative and imaginative a way as possible. A 1990s Usenet troll called Macon used to respond to flames by posting a single, 1,500-word epic mash-up of creative insults he’d written over the years: ‘You are the unholy spawn of a bandy-legged hobo and a syphilitic camel. You wear strangely mismatched clothing with oddly placed stains . . .’ When, in 1993, a user named Moby asked the group alt.tasteless for advice about how to deal with a pair of cats on heat who were ruining his love life, he received an explosion of maniacal solutions, each more ludicrous than the last: do-it-yourself spaying, execution by handgun, incineration and, perhaps inevitably, sex with the cats.

  On both Usenet and BBS new idioms, rules and norms were being created. But it was a world that was about to be inundated. The early 1990s saw the number of internet users grow exponentially. And many new users would beeline straight for one of the most active and interesting places online: alt.*. Usenetters, irate at the sudden influx of immigrants, attempted to flush them out. In 1992, in the group alt.folklore.urban, a new type of flaming was mentioned for the first time, targeted at the recent arrivals: trolling. The idea was to ‘troll for newbies’fn3*: an experienced user would post an urban myth or legend about Usenet in the hope of eliciting a surprised reaction from anyone new, thereby exposing their status. Caught you! The responder would thereafter be mercilessly mocked.

  With so many potential targets, flaming and trolling began to spread, and became increasingly sophisticated. Several groups dedicated to trolling were set up in alt.* In 1999, one user called ‘Cappy Hamper’ listed in the group alt.trolls six different types of trolls: the ‘straight-up asshole flame troll’ (‘easy!’ explained Cappy Hamper, ‘Post in alt.skinheads with the header: “you buncha racist asswipers eat dog crap bisquits!”’); the ‘clueless newbie joke troll’; the ‘hit, run and watch troll’; the ‘confidence’ or ‘tactical troll’; the ‘creative cross-post troll’; and the ‘gang troll’.

  The Meowers were infamous gang trolls. In 1997 a group of Harvard students had joined an abandoned Usenet group called alt.fan.karl-malden.nose to post updates about comings and goings on campus. They then started to mildly flame other Usenet groups, in order, wrote one, ‘to rile up the stupid people’. Matt Bruce, one of the Harvard group, suggested targeting alt.tv.beavis-n-butthead. Users of alt.tv.beavis-n-butthead didn’t take kindly to these arrogant students, and started to post back to alt.fan.karl-malden.nose. So did people from other Usenet groups. So much so that the Harvard students abandoned the group, and the Beavis and Butthead invaders took it over, renaming themselves ‘the Meowers’, in mock deference to a Harvard student who, because his initials were C.A.T., signed off his messages with ‘meow’. The Meowers began setting up other Usenet groups (including alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk, alt.non.sequitur and alt.stupidity), from which they started to invade other groups by posting ridiculous, Monty Pythonesque posts, preventing anyone else from posting or entering into a discussion. This technique, now known as ‘crap-flooding’, is still very popular among trolls. In 1997–8 the Meowers went on a crap-flooding spree, targeting groups across Usenet with what they called their ‘Usenet performance art’. Meowers would also spam individuals who fought back, using anonymous remailers to disguise the address of the sender. The college email system at Boston University was broken by a Meower spam-flood. The campaign lasted for at least two years.

  The trolling collective alt.synta
x.tactical specialised in the ‘cross-post’ troll. Members would take a genuine post (from a group like alt.smokers, for example) and forward it via an anonymous remailer, with the original email address intact, to a group who, they believed, would not respond kindly (alt.support.non-smokers), sparking an argument between two groups who had no idea that they were, in effect, trolling each other. Alt.syntax.tactical attacks were carefully planned and often involved plants, dummies and double agents. Trolls like alt.syntax.tactical weren’t out for quick wins, but to provoke as large and aggressive a reaction as possible. This is, they argued, what separated the trolls from the flames. A flame was typically just a deluge of insults. Although there was some overlap between the two, a troll was considered to be more careful, subtle and imaginative: ‘A troll will hold back, understanding the value of a bigger spank,’ wrote one anonymous poster to the group alt.troll. And the bigger the ‘spank’ the better:

  Anyone can walk into rec.sport.baseball and say ‘baseball sucks’. It takes unbelievable skill and discipline to cause a PROLONGED flame war. That is what we do. But it can only be done with talent, and numbers to match that talent. We only bring into the fold people who have the knack to use smarts to incite chaos.

  Alt.syntax.tactical were explicit in their goals:

  * Our names to appear in kill files

  * Regulars/Legit people abandon invaded newsgroup

  * Receive much hate mail

  As trolling spread, so did its reputation. It was at this time that the industry standard response emerged: ‘Don’t feed the trolls!’ A line that spurred many trolls on to increasingly extreme and shocking behaviour.

  In the late 1990s, trolling took a leap towards the gutter. Trolls of the era had an informal but widely accepted code of conduct: ‘Trolling is matching wits . . .’ wrote one anonymous user in alt.trolls in 1999:

  The contest must be confined to the ‘level playing field’ of Usenet. What someone posts on Usenet is fair game. But real life investigations into what someone posting with their real name does in real life by someone not using their real name (or a common and virtually untraceable one) shouldn’t strike anyone as fair.

  But the distinction between digital and real was becoming increasingly vague for newer users. Two long-running, infamous episodes put paid to the ‘real-life’ limits. A small disagreement in alt.gossip.celebrities between two posters, Maryanne Kehoe and Jeff Boyd, quickly degenerated into an argument. Kehoe believed that Boyd was spamming the group with pointless messages, and emailed his employers asking for action to be taken against him. The vicious troll, it turned out, was a sensible computer programmer, and had recently become a father. In possibly the longest case of trolling in the history of the net, the games developer Derek Smart was insulted repeatedly about his (admittedly disappointing) 1996 game Battlecruiser 3000AD. ‘They were your run-of-the-mill anti-social misfits. And when they run into people like me – who doesn’t take crap from anyone – well, then everyone cried foul,’ Smart told me, via email. Arguments in Usenet groups when the game was released spread across the internet and just kept ratcheting up, partly because Smart kept counter-trolling. ‘Back in the day,’ he confessed, ‘I let this sort of thing get to me.’ By 2000, most of the comments concerned Smart’s personal life and professional credentials, and most were allegedly posted by a man named Bill Huffman, a ‘self-proclaimed Derekologist’, and the manager of a California software company. Smart was also stalked by a sixteen-year-old, who claimed to own a gun. Smart applied for restraining orders and filed complaints with a confused police force. The final dispute – concerning a website Huffman had set up – was only settled in 2013.

  This niche online world was being subsumed by the newcomers: Usenet codes of conduct about trolling were increasingly meaningless. It was about to get a lot worse.

  GNAA and Goatse

  By the late nineties some feared that Usenet would be ruined by trolling. In the end, innovation killed it off. The internet was becoming more accessible and the speed of downloading (and more importantly, uploading) was slashed, enabling users to post more content online, including pictures and videos. Usenet, like most new and exciting technologies, had become outdated.

  At the turn of the millennium, trolls migrated from Usenet to a new breed of irreverent, user-driven, censorship-free sites, that were soon collectively labelled as ‘Not Safe For Work’ (NSFW), and often created by students or teenagers: SomethingAwful.com, Fark.com and Slashdot.com. Unlike traditional media, these sites were filled with stories, links, suggestions and comments from their readers. Whatever stories were the most read or shared by users would rise up the ranking system, meaning popularity was driven not by centralised editorial control but by whatever happened to capture the attention of the community. This created – as with many content-driven sectors online – a natural incentive to be outrageous. Stories that were offensive, rude or bizarre were usually the most popular. Fark had one million unique visitors in its fourth year of existencefn4: a decent slice of the internet pie in 2000, when only 360 million people in the whole world were online.

  The denizens of these new sites adopted and extended the philosophy of their trolling predecessors: abhorrence of censorship – which was thought of as archaic and analogue – and the idea that nothing online was to be taken seriously. The humour – which still characterises a lot of internet culture – was abstract, self-referential and irreverent.

  Trolls pressed offensiveness into the service of this ideology, often in creatively disgusting ways. Goatse is short for ‘goat-sex’. It is also the name of a website set up in 1999. (I don’t advise that you search for it.) The home page features a photograph of a naked middle-aged man stretching open his anus. Trolls used the website for ‘bait-and-switch’ pranks: the posting or sending of harmless looking links that actually direct clickers to the Goatse website. This is also known as ‘shock trolling’. In 2000, Goatse links were repeatedly posted on Oprah Winfrey’s ‘Soul Stories’ chat board, with misleading accompanying messages: ‘I’ve been feeling so down lately, here’s a link to a poem I’ve written.’ There was an exodus of offended Oprah fans, and at one point the whole board was shut down. The SomethingAwful users behind the prank celebrated this strike against the earnestness that seemed to be spreading across the internet.fn5

  The Gay Nigger Association of America (GNAA) was created in 2002, and typified this sort of extreme trolling. Their opening page featured the following invitation: ‘Are you GAY? Are you a NIGGER? Are you a GAY NIGGER? If you answered “Yes” to all of the above questions, then GNAA might be exactly what you’re looking for!’ The creators of GNAA were reportedly highly skilled programmers,fn6 and dedicated an enormous amount of time to creating and disseminating extremely offensive material, with the aim of upsetting bloggers, celebrities, popular websites and anyone else the group took against. It would often ‘crap-flood’ sites – filling chat functions with nonsense, just as the Meowers had done a decade earlier – and hack other popular websites to alter them. GNAA described their purpose as ‘sowing disruption on the internet’ but eventually set up an internet security organisation, hacking into sites to demonstrate how susceptible to attack they were. They called it Goatse Security – ‘exposing gaping holes’ – and while members of the group have been investigated by the FBI for various hacking offences, Goatse Security has also identified and fixed a number of security flaws in major internet products and software. Zack was an early admirer of GNAA and Goatse. ‘People were just so ready to be offended by things like Goatse,’ he tells me. ‘It’s fun to upset someone who is so ready to be offended. And when they get upset, they prove you’re right. It’s circular.’

  Doing It for the Lulz

  In some ways Zack, GNAA and other NSFW trolls felt it was ‘their’ internet that was being invaded by marketers, celebrities, big business, the authorities and legions of ordinary people, in the same way Usenetters felt inundated in 1993. People outside of the tribe, and all of them taking e
verything so seriously. Out of this milieu came Christopher Poole, a fourteen-year-old fan of SomethingAwful, who had found a Japanese image-sharing website called Futaba that allowed users to post about anything, anonymously. NSFW sites were exciting and bold – but participants were often identifiable, and sites were frequently moderated. The anonymous Futaba users were wildly creative, highly offensive and uncontrollable. The website was notorious in Japan for gory fiction about students slaughtering teachers, anime porn, and much besides, causing general moral outrage. Futaba’s web address was www.2chan.net, in tribute to the similarly outrageous website 2channel, so when Poole decided to set up an English-language equivalent in 2003, he called it 4chan: ‘its [sic] TWO TIMES THE CHAN MOTHERFUCK!’ he posted under the pseudonym ‘moot’.

  Zack joined immediately: ‘We were trying to carve out our own space, our own part of the internet.’ The quasi-enforced anonymity made /b/ a natural home for trolls. Trolling in /b/ is widespread and extremely varied, with dozens of different trolling categories. The hacktivist collective Anonymous were almost all committed /b/tards, and used the site to plan and coordinate their ‘operations’. The group’s first major action was called Project Chanology, directed against the Church of Scientology after the Church tried to remove embarrassing videos of Tom Cruise from the net. Although the message was a genuine one – about censorship and transparency – alongside the serious demonstrations and computer hacks were endless prank phone calls to the Scientology hotline, 4chan-inspired placards and hundreds of black faxes.fn7

  Enforced anonymity, the competitive urge to outdo your fellow users and a determination to push offensiveness in the name of a vague anti-censorship ideology are all wrapped up in a/b/trolling catchphrase: ‘I did it for the lulz’ – a phrase employed to justify anything and everything where the chief motivation is to generate a laugh at someone else’s expense. The problem, as Zack explains, is that ‘lulz’ are a bit like a drug: you need a bigger and bigger hit to keep the feeling going. Trolling can quickly spiral out of control. The popular social networking and news-sharing site Reddit once hosted a group called Game of Trolls. Its rules were simple: if you successfully upset someone on Reddit without them realising they were being trolled, you won a point. If you were identified as a troll, you lost a point. The highest scorers were listed on a leaderboard. One user visited a popular subreddit and posted an invented story about the problems he was having with a co-worker. The same user then replied as the co-worker in question, demanding an apology, and explaining that he had difficulty making friends. Redditors believed the story, and some even offered to send flowers to the abused colleague. The group had been successfully trolled. ‘It was glorious,’ recalled a witness. Game of Trolls was eventually banned by Reddit; a highly unusual step for the otherwise liberal site, but testament to the pervasiveness and persistence of the Reddit trolls.