Hackers on Steroids (16 page)

Headed by 44-year-old Joe Sullivan from Massachusetts, the main Facebook security team - along with its outsourced content censors - are responsible for combating all the trolling, pornography, scammers, spammers, fakers, paedos, pirates, hackers, psychos, racists, viruses, inciters, and general miscreants among a population of around 900 million people. Most of Facebook’s security team are based in its California offices, while a smaller number again are based in Dublin. The security teams are responsible for things like dealing with police requests for information on users (something that they fight against as much as possible, according to Joe Sullivan), actively searching out problem users like some of the paedophiles who use the service to groom children with, or chasing up and identifying the criminals who release viruses into the system.

The vast majority of the reports of dodgy and illegal content that Facebook deals with, though, come straight from its own user base, and the content censors are the people who deal with most of the millions of daily reports made against other users by Facebook citizens. They are the people who have to wade through most of the filth in the open cesspool that is Facebook. Here, Facebook outsources its censorship work - some to Americans who get paid around $8 - $12 per hour, and some to workers in Turkey, Mexico, the Philippines, Morocco, and India, who get paid around $1 per hour for work that is coming from the multi-billion dollar company. These mainly work-from-home administrators are told to delete any content reported to them that Facebook has deemed inappropriate, such as any nudity, which up until recently included any photos of women breastfeeding babies. Ass cracks and camel toes are also out. Photos of people lying drunk are verboten as well, as are photos of sleeping people with things or words drawn onto their faces. Crushed limbs and heads are okay though, and videos of schoolyard fights can be okay too as long as they aren’t ‘tormenting’ someone by being up. But pictures of builder’s bums and drunks lying sprawled out are the least of the content censor workers worries.

One ex-censor told the website Gawker.com: ‘Peadophelia, necrophilia, beheadings, suicides, etc. I left because I value my mental sanity.’ An industry group that reports to the US Congress recommended that companies which deal with the deletion of these sorts of images be provided with economic incentives to offer for their employees much needed psychological support. David Graham, the president of Telecommunication on Demand, an American company which provides content censors for a host of Internet companies including Facebook, said to the New York Times that the censors are like ‘combat veterans, completely desensitized to all kinds of imagery.’ Desensitisation is a killer of the soul. And the worst thing is that no matter how hard these people work to take these images down and no matter how much of themselves they give to this task and which they will never get back, up those same images are going to go again and again. If the Internet is something like an online multi-player computer game, then the bad guys have all learned how to use the infinite lives cheat.

Just how weird and ever-so-slightly demented that the Facebook content policy is can best be illustrated by the company’s reaction in April 2012 to a troll-made page called: ‘If this gets one million likes, I will let Maddie out of my basement.’ The page was set up to mock Madeleine McCann, the little English girl who went missing in Portugal in 2007 aged three and who has not been found since.  When contacted by Scotland’s Daily Record about the page, Facebook said that they would delete it but only for what they called ‘technical reasons,’ meaning that the creator of the page was using a fake identity profile. If this had not been the case then they would have allowed it to stay, as, according to a Facebook source who spoke to the newspaper, the group was merely ‘humour about a public figure.’ ‘The page is intended to be humorous and the target of the humour – Madeleine McCann – is a public figure. As a result, it does not breach our terms,’ said the source. The company bans photographs of earwax from appearing on its pages.

Forbes reports that in the Californian offices of the Facebook security team hang like scalps photographs of some of the criminal Facebook users that Joe Sullivan and his fellow cybercops have ‘hunted down and kicked off the site.’ What the magazine doesn’t report is that all which those same ‘scammers, hackers and paedophiles’ had to do after being ‘kicked off the site’ was to simply make new accounts and go back to their scamming, their hacking, and their paedophilic activities as if nothing at all had happened to them. These sorts of criminals laugh in the face of such myths that are told about individuals being ‘kicked off’ websites like Facebook.

Over the years Facebook have tried all kinds of things to get rid of the RIP trolls, from disallowing some of the pseudonyms employed by the most notorious of them from being used for new profiles, to setting up programs to search for probable trolling activities and programs that automatically detect and ban all the likely fake profiles on a known offender’s friend list, to demanding a telephone number to go along with every new account being made. So, in short, Facebook have shown that they will do anything to stop these types of individuals from using their service, except anything which would actually work. It is fake accounts that keep the shit and the filth flowing constantly through the RIP trolling sewer, cut off the possibility of these fake accounts being made and that sewer would soon all but dry up.

But how to go about that? Is there a way to achieve this without it affecting too much the real ease with which people can just signup and go onto Facebook? As Facebook is first and last a soulless and cold-hearted business then don’t expect them to act unless they are forced to, either by government pressure or - as is more likely - under pressure from the advertisers who are now making rumbles about the ridiculous number of fake accounts on the site.

I used to have the idea that to combat fake accounts coming onto the network in the first place new accounts being set up would have to be tied to a bank account number, and the name given with those accounts would have to be the same - or very close to - the name on the bank account. If that account is disabled by Facebook then that same account number cannot be used again. Credit card numbers could also be used but the problem is that not everyone - especially in Third World countries - has access to a personal credit card. But social security or even library card numbers could also be used in such a theoretical scenario. But the thing is, this sort of thing is never going to happen. Even if it were possible for Facebook to somehow create a system that automatically links into a database of library card or social security numbers, it would have to be with the cooperation of every country in which it operates for this system to work. Same as it being linked to bank account numbers: just about every bank in the world would have to be linked into a database that can be accessed by Facebook’s servers. Something like this is just not going to happen, ever.

But there could be a sensible and reasonable solution to the problem, or at least as much of a solution as there can be expected to be found. While not perfect, this is the best thing that I can come up with, and I have thought a lot about possible solutions. If on signing up to Facebook a new user had to be vouched for by three different already existing accounts, and that those accounts have to have been active for over a certain number of months and to have on them over a certain number of people on their friend lists, then it could seriously cut down on the malicious fakes in the long run. Of course, trolls would just use to vouch for themselves and their troll friends their own real-name accounts along with some possibly existing fake ones that have somehow escaped being disabled over a length of time, but if Facebook made it so that any account which has vouched for a number of profiles which are subsequently disabled – say three or four profiles - is itself automatically banned, then that would begin to take care of that. Until a new account is vouched for by three already established users it cannot join anyone’s friend list, post on any walls, or send any messages.  The people who can be asked to vouch for any new account can be found through the email contacts of someone newly signing up to Facebook, and finding people through the email account of a new user is something that Facebook already does. If there are no email contacts on an email address being used to set up a new Facebook account, then that is a very good indication that the email address, along with the new account, are fakes.

The trolls, determined as many of them are, would of course try to find ways around this, most obviously by making many new accounts and leaving them for months, but Facebook could counter this by implementing in its new signup system software which detects whether accounts which are vouching for a new member are real or fake. One possible way to do that would be to automatically detect whether an account is being used regularly for what could reasonably be assumed to be genuine use, like updating status information and taking part in activities with friends, such as commenting on their walls or private messaging with them. The software could also check that these profiles share a certain number of mutual friends with people on their friend lists. This would ensure that the person who is operating the account hasn’t just added random people like are to be found on the so-called ‘Add me’ pages which litter Facebook (or ‘friends whore pages’ as I like to call them) and whereon needy people congregate to beg for new ‘friends’ to come onto their profiles to tell them how sexy they look in their photos. These the trolls will often visit to very quickly add dozens of people onto their friend lists in the hope that their profiles will appear to Facebook’s detection software to be real.

It too would help if Facebook would also ban any static IP addresses used by psycho-trolls, as well as putting a blanket ban on the use of proxy IP addresses - that is, faked IP addresses - being used to access the site with (something which, irony of ironies, the troll Mecca of 4Chan has implemented to try and stop child pornography sharers). An odd troll here and there would continue to slip through the cracks, and the saddest and most demented of them would spend their entire lives trying to do so, but if this system were implemented then it would, after a little time, seriously, seriously stunt the level of RIP trolling on the site – most obviously by making it harder for them to roam about in large packs that can keep on regenerating time and again - and all without affecting in any meaningful way the ease with which genuine users can register and go onto the site. Because something desperately does need to be done, and whether Facebook are forced to do that something for the right reasons or for business reasons, they must be forced. As while the profiles aren’t real, the pain which some of the users of them can cause with those fake profiles is most certainly very real.

Tom Mullaney from Birmingham, England, was 15-years-old when he took his own life in the May of 2010. What started off as tension between him and some other boy in school ended with him being threatened on Facebook over the course of a couple of days by that boy and his friends. All of this so affected his mind that he went out into the garden of the house which he shared with his parents and his older brother and hanged himself in it. His father, Robert Mullaney, found his body hanging there the next morning.

While fake profiles on Facebook had nothing to do with the initial online threats, they had everything to do with what came next. The circumstances around Tom Mullaney’s suicide were widely reported on in the British media, and when I read a report about it the first thing that I thought to myself was that because of the Facebook connection the RIP trolls were going to descend on this story and have a field day with it. And, sure enough, the ghoulish bastards didn’t prove me wrong. Very quickly after the story went out, hundreds of the cockroaches crawled onto the tribute page that his brother Ashley had set up to gain comfort from. Colm Coss sent out invitations to dozens of trolls to come and join in the trolling, although probably little difference would it have made if he hadn’t. This was when the main 2010 RIP troll pack on Facebook was at its very height and the story of a young kid’s suicide being linked to their favourite website had delighted and incited them all. They all wanted a bit of the action for themselves.

Dozens of graphic photoshops of the young lad soon appeared, with various images of him hanging and with blood coming out of his eyes and from his mouth being made by the cretins and posted up; along with hundreds of the usual comments, ranging from witless ‘jokes’ repeated again and again to the standard sexual remarks and threats to dig up the body of the boy. If anything proves what loathsome lies these sadists tell about ‘cultural criticism’ and ‘grief tourists’ it is this and how it dragged on for months on different troll-made pages even as the parents of the lad appeared on television to talk of their devastation at it all. Early appeals by his brother on the original page for the trolls to stop it were just met with more abuse about Tom directed towards him.

‘I can still see the caption, I can still see the photograph, I can still see the words. It’s imprinted on your brain,’ is what Robert Mullaney said on television of one particular image that he had to take down. On another occasion he told a newspaper that: ‘I thought my heart was being ripped out. The human mind is like a record. Every day, those images and words keep going round and round in my head. I thought it couldn’t get any worse - and then it did.’