Read The Dark Net for Free Online

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 embarrassingvideos 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 liberalsite, but testament to the pervasiveness and persistence of the Reddit trolls.
    The competition to insult and offend, by any means necessary, can often lead to shocking extremes. In 2006 Mitchell Henderson, a fifteen-year-old from Minnesota, committed suicide by shooting himself with his parents’ rifle. Mitchell’s classmates created a virtual memorial for him on MySpace and wrote a short eulogy, which included repeated references to Mitchell as ‘an hero’: ‘he was an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back.’ The combination of a grammatical error with the contention that committing suicide was a ‘heroic’ act caused great hilarity on 4chan. After learning that Mitchell had lost an iPod shortly before killing himself, the /b/tards created photoshopped images of Mitchell and his lost device. One even took a photo of an iPod on Mitchell’s grave, and sent it to his bereaved parents. For almost two years after his death, they received anonymous phone calls from people claiming to have found Mitchell’s iPod.
Meeting the Trolls
    Finding genuine trolls is difficult. Many use proxy servers to mask their IP addresses and most have dozens of accounts with different names for each platform they use. If they are banned or blocked by a particular site, they’ll just rejoin under a new name. But like the Meowers, today’s trolls enjoy spending time with other trolls. A lot of the worst trolling is coordinated from hidden or secret channels and chat rooms.
    Zack agreed to show me one of his hideouts, inviting me in to a secret channel he’s been frequenting for over two years. It’s a private group on a well-known social media page, ‘a pirate base for trolls’, he told me. The main group page – the one the typical user sees – is a series of pictures of people masturbating. ‘That’s a facade,’ says Zack, ‘to keep away the dullards.’ To get to the real action, you have to be invited to join as a moderator by an existing moderator, granting you access to the group’s internal mailing system. Inside,