Malwebolence - The World of Web Trolling. In the late 1. 98. Search metadata Search full text of books Search TV captions Search archived web sites Advanced Search. Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single- topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M. I. T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo- naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. And now just because it's such an amazingly stupid and fun web hack circa 1997 that I stumbed upon recently and it had the keyword 'lyberty' in it. We all know someone who has a haircut horror story.or we have one of our own. You can take steps to avoid a bad haircut, but if you already have one, here’s how. 10/21:華和茶会民族系アンビエントlive. 告知. 10/21にn.a.s.s.とのコラボレーションで、華和茶会エスニックアンビエントliveを.It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their My. Space profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 5. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.“Lulz” is how trolls keep score. A corruption of “LOL” or “laugh out loud,” “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium. Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,0. I contacted, refused to disclose his legal identity. Another troll explained the lulz as a quasi- thermodynamic exchange between the sensitive and the cruel: “You look for someone who is full of it, a real blowhard. Then you exploit their insecurities to get an insane amount of drama, laughs and lulz. Rules would be simple: 1. Do whatever it takes to get lulz. Make sure the lulz is widely distributed. This will allow for more lulz to be made. The game is never over until all the lulz have been had.”/b/ is not all bad. Among /b/’s more interesting spawn is Anonymous, a group of masked pranksters who organized protests at Church of Scientology branches around the world. But the logic of lulz extends far beyond /b/ to the anonymous message boards that seem to be springing up everywhere. Two female Yale Law School students have filed a suit against pseudonymous users who posted violent fantasies about them on Auto. Admit, a college- admissions message board. In China, anonymous nationalists are posting death threats against pro- Tibet activists, along with their names and home addresses. Technology, apparently, does more than harness the wisdom of the crowd. It can intensify its hatred as well. 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 2. Craigslist, posing as a woman seeking a “str. More than 1. 00 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 2. Megan Meier My. Space suicide. Meier, a 1. 3- year- old Missouri girl, hanged herself with a belt after receiving cruel messages from a boy she’d been flirting with on My. Space. 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.”A flat- screen HDTV dominated Fortuny’s living room, across from a futon prepped with neatly folded blankets. This was where I would sleep for the next few nights. As Fortuny picked up his cat and settled into an Eames- style chair, I asked whether trolling hurt people. I’m not going to sit here and say, ‘Oh, God, please forgive me!’ so someone can feel better,” Fortuny said, his calm voice momentarily rising. The cat lay purring in his lap. Am I the bad guy? Am I the big horrible person who shattered someone’s life with some information? No! This is life. Welcome to life. Everyone goes through it. I’ve been through horrible stuff, too.”“Like what?” I asked. Sexual abuse, Fortuny said. When Jason was 5, he said, he was molested by his grandfather and three other relatives. Jason’s mother later told me, too, that he was molested by his grandfather. The last she heard from Jason was a letter telling her to kill herself. Jason is a young man in a great deal of emotional pain,” she said, crying as she spoke. Don’t be too harsh. He’s still my son.”In the days after the Megan Meier story became public, Lori Drew and her family found themselves in the trolls’ crosshairs. Their personal information — e- mail addresses, satellite images of their home, phone numbers — spread across the Internet. One of the numbers led to a voice- mail greeting with the gleeful words “I did it for the lulz.” Anonymous malefactors made death threats and hurled a brick through the kitchen window. Then came the Megan Had It Coming blog. Supposedly written by one of Megan’s classmates, the blog called Megan a “drama queen,” so unstable that Drew could not be blamed for her death. Killing yourself over a My. Space boy? Come on!!! I mean yeah your fat so you have to take what you can get but still nobody should kill themselves over it.” In the third post the author revealed herself as Lori Drew. This post received more than 3,6. Fox and CNN debated its authenticity. But the Drew identity was another mask. In fact, Megan Had It Coming was another Jason Fortuny experiment. He, not Lori Drew, Fortuny told me, was the blog’s author. After watching him log onto the site and add a post, I believed him. The blog was intended, he says, to question the public’s hunger for remorse and to challenge the enforceability of cyberharassment laws like the one passed by Megan’s town after her death. Fortuny concluded that they were unenforceable. The county sheriff’s department announced it was investigating the identity of the fake Lori Drew, but it never found Fortuny, who is not especially worried about coming out now. What’s he going to sue me for?” he asked. Leading on confused people? Why don’t people fact- check who this stuff is coming from? Why do they assume it’s true?”Fortuny calls himself “a normal person who does insane things on the Internet,” and the scene at dinner later on the first day we spent together was exceedingly normal, with Fortuny, his roommate Charles and his longtime friend Zach trading stories at a sushi restaurant nearby over sake and happy- hour gyoza. Fortuny flirted with our waitress, showing her a cellphone picture of his cat. He commands you to kill!” he cackled. Do you know how many I’ve killed at his command?” Everyone laughed. Fortuny spent most of the weekend in his bedroom juggling several windows on his monitor. One displayed a chat room run by Encyclopedia Dramatica, an online compendium of troll humor and troll lore.
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