Hackers on Steroids (9 page)

Non-stop.

When I awoke the next morning and checked Facebook I was greatly amused to see that he was still at it and had been so all night. All. Fucking. Night. And still it carried on - without a break, nonsense post after nonsense post -
UNTIL AFTER 8PM THAT NIGHT
. When challenged on the length of this single trolling session he bizarrely claimed that it was ‘part of his job’ and that he was ‘getting well paid for it.’ Three days after Christmas 2010 I looked onto Facebook and saw that he had spent Christmas evening trolling fat people. Santa wept and I got inspired to write a takeoff of the classic Mud festive song ‘Lonely This Christmas’:

It’ll be Baloney this Christmas

Without real
life friends around

It’ll be Baloney this Christmas

Baloney and cold

It’ll be cold, so cold

But at least he’ll have trolled

This Christmas

P
aul Baloney is a leader of trolls. On Facebook, on where he most usually uses the name ‘Tylor Durden’ but goes by many other aliases too (the most common of those being ‘Honesto Cop’ and ‘Frankie Bags’), he runs his own indescribably sad little trolling crew named ‘Teh Council,’ over whom he rules with a rod of iron. Most of them are much younger than him - being aged from around 12 to their late teens - and so he comes across as something of an Internet Charles Manson: an older, infinitely creepy, and supremely psychotic horror show who has gathered under his wing the lost children of the night, all of whom are both braindead and disturbed enough to do his nefarious bidding for him. According to an ex-girlfriend of his, and who herself trolled at one stage, he also has a severe hygiene problem, refusing to wash and to change his socks for days and days on end, which makes me think that he must also smell how I imagine Charlie Manson to smell too. Paul Baloney is like something that will be found at some stage in the near future lowering a basket into a well while chanting repeatedly that: ‘It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again,’ and all while dressed in a suit of the finest human skin.

His troll ex-girlfriend told a story about waking up one morning to find Paul Baloney’s hands around her throat and a look of purest hate upon his horrible, horrible face. ‘Sorry,’ said Paul when he let go of her after she began to struggle. ‘You reminded me of my mother there. I hate that whore.’

His crew is, as you would imagine, made up mostly of males but sometimes a female or two pops into it for a time, only to be driven off again by the collective when inevitably she incurs Baloney’s wrath by beginning to get too close to any one single member of the goon squad. Baloney doesn’t tolerate the idea of ‘hoes before bros’ in his gang, feeling that his power becomes eroded whenever a female begins to exert too much influence over one of his winged monkeys. One hilarious example of when a female entered their trolling pit and caused great ructions within it occurred close to the Christmas period in 2011. The woman, a Scottish troll in her early or mid-20s and who trolls under the pseudonym ‘Iona’ but whose real first name is Michelle, captured the heart of one of Baloney’s top lieutenants, a Texan troll who goes under the pseudonyms ‘Peter Partyvan’ and ‘Peter Vance.’ ‘Peter’ was one of the older members of the Baloney crew, being in his 20s. A severely, utterly deranged individual who is notorious even among the trolls themselves for his multiple mental disorders and rampant paranoia, Peter Paranoid as he is known to some of us pretended to be a medical doctor but was doxed by some of the other trolls as working in a call centre.

The blossoming love between this gruesome twosome so worried Baloney that he gave the order for Iona to sleep with one of his other lieutenants instead so as to drive a wedge between her and his beloved Peter, whose attentions he demanded all for himself.

Yes, that right - he actually
ordered
this Iona creature to sleep with one of his trolls. The troll in question, a friendless 19-year-old part German/part American by the name of Josh and who suffers from what looks like Elephantitis of the face, was coming over to Britain that Christmas to hang out with Baloney and some other trolls, including the then soon-to-be-infamous Damon Evans from Wales, another of Baloney’s winged monkeys. This Josh character makes frequent trips around the world to visit trolls he has met online, which isn’t surprising really as he is known to be a very lonely boy in real life. Perhaps regular people don’t like hanging out with sociopathic morons who drool all over themselves at news of people dying in car accidents. Who’d have thought it, eh?

Anyway, Baloney had issued the order for Iona to take this Josh creature into her house for a time over the Christmas period for the purpose of having sex with him. Josh was all for it, in fact was salivating at the very thought. Because that’s what normal people do, isn’t it - jet over the world to spend Christmas Day in the company of people whom they have never met before. And then demand of them that they fuck you. The image of an official troll order being issued that commanded one troll to copulate with another is something which I will never be able to get out of my poor head, much as I may desperately wish to. 

Iona, her little heart filled with love for Peter, bravely refused her master’s order and instead she and Peter declared their undying devotion to each other, proving that love is indeed stronger than fear. Brings a tear to the eye, doesn’t it? A real Mills and Goon romance, eyes meeting over a trolled Facebook page.

For Baloney, this resistance to his edict was tantamount to treason and he and the rest of his still-loyal cultural critics spent weeks openly feuding with Iona and Peter in what was a very amusing spectacle that saw both sides spilling all the dirt and the embarrassing secrets which they held on the other side. ‘Peter Vance, you’re dead to me,’ is how Baloney publicly declared their relationship over in an emotionally-charged posting spree outlining his feelings of betrayal and making clear to Peter and Iona that they should be scared. Very scared indeed. Because Baloney had issued a new decree banning them from appearing anywhere on the entire Internet any longer. ‘Don't make me prove to you that I haven't even tried,’ said the 32-year-old lets-pretend don of the cyber-underworld on forcing the loved-up couple to retreat from the Web. ‘In fact, please say it again and watch what happens.’

But this is the kind of ego and relationships-driven drama that takes place in the Facebook trolliverse all the time. Unlike 4Chan and its totally anonymous system, Facebook by its very nature has allowed these mentalist monstrosities to develop recognisable Internet identities and so thus has sprung up a trolling soap opera complete with all the drama, horror, and comedy that you would expect in a saga starring such total and absolute headcases. There also exists on Facebook an ongoing battle between trolls and anti-trolls, a peculiar spectacle where individuals who want to destroy each other’s real lives and reputations are interacting daily with one another on a social network. It is a cloak-and-dagger game of subterfuge and attempted real life repercussions that if nothing else keeps the trolls’ energies sometimes more focused on it and away from RIP walls. 

Much of the drama between the trolls has been caused by the constantly shrieking and maniacal Paul Baloney himself, the man who many trolls blame for - and who I myself also give credit to – destroying what was once upon a time a disturbingly large trolling ring. In many ways, Baloney is the greatest anti-troll of all time and credit is due to him for starting what became known to some as the 2010 Great Facebook Troll Wars. These tore apart the main body of the Facebook RIP trolls, significantly depriving those trolls of much of their power to cause harm while also tying them up in what seemed to be an everlasting hell of endless bellowing and blubbering and doxing and counter-doxing and stupidity and spectacle. And at the centre of it all lay a leaked photograph of Paul Baloney’s comically puny pecker hanging beside a small Nokia mobile phone and proving itself of similar size to his also-in-the-picture thumb.

The photograph was posted onto Facebook by his aforementioned troll ex-girlfriend, who unsurprisingly was a little bit angry that Mr Baloney had tried to have both she and her family targeted by drug dealers in her home town of Manchester once she called it quits with him. He had got to hear about another troll having hacked the Facebook account of some jailed Manc drug dealer, who unbeknownst to him until he was contacted in jail by one of his associates had been daily ‘coming out’ as gay on his Facebook page.

Baloney saw here his opportunity and contacted on Facebook some of this dealer’s friends and gave them the names and addresses of his ex-girlfriend and her family, claiming that they were behind the hacking. He also did his familiar routine of making Facebook groups with their names and addresses in them and alleging that they were paedophiles. All of this led to his ex having to move house for her own safety.

Her revenge though in the form of the releasing of that photograph of his little pecker sounded the final toll of the bell for his already seriously questionable levels of sanity and he very quickly lost totally the last grip on both himself and on reality which he may then have had left. Any troll who publicly laughed at the photograph and mocked his wiener was soon to get caught up in the psychotic whirlwind of revenge that Baloney’s acute embarrassment unleashed and quickly sides were taken, threats were made, and dox was spilled. Baloney and his winged monkeys spent most of the rest of the year fighting online with people who had laughed at his wee dick.

And, needless to say, all of the while I and the rest of the anti-trolls were loving this. Christmas had come early in 2010 and it kept on coming. I ‘cloned’ the accounts of a few trolls, that is I made accounts in their names and featuring the profile pictures which they would normally use, and made various groups of my own to mock the now notorious pecker. These groups never lasted long as it appeared obvious that Baloney was getting his army of gimps to mass report them to Facebook with their many accounts and so ensure their speedy demise, but the damage was done and done good when he fell easily for it. Trolls getting trolled to troll other trolls, always good that. Divide and conquer.

I sometimes have felt as if I were stuck in the middle of a Coen brothers film, but even the Coens at their best could not come up with characters and scenarios as the likes of which are to be found in this trolliverse. Two main camps had sprung up. One was that of Baloney and many of the more absolutely psychotic trolls who lack totally any real sense of humour and who get off even more on trying to ruin vulnerable people’s lives and inciting violence against innocent people than on ‘mere’ RIP trolling itself, which they do partake in but which to them lacks the trill and empowerment of a concerted cyberharassment campaign against lone individuals. In Baloney, these mostly younger and angrier trolls have something of a god figure as he undeniably aspires to successfully incite murder and he obsessively day and night seeks out people online with whom he and his little orc-things can feud. Baloney had these trolls go all-out to defend the pecker, with Josh writing that the pecker ‘fucks different women every day until they can’t walk’ and is ‘a good size,’ while a clearly distraught Peter Partyvan tried the sarcasm approach by spamming every discussion on the pecker with things like ‘OH YEAH THAT’S REALLY FUNNY!! HA HA HA HA YOU SAID A MAN’S PENIS IS SMALL!! OH HA HA HA LET ME PICK MYSELF UP OFF THE FLOOR HERE!!’

The other camp came to be headed by the future-infamous Darren ‘Nimrod’ Burton, and who was one of the trolls I had cloned to fool Baloney into believing that they were carrying out a campaign of mockery against his pecker. While also a bunch of sickos who laugh every time they hear of a person they don’t know dying, many of them had revealed that they could as well find humour in more reasonable things - such as the wee willy - and many of these trolls aren’t as interested in trying to bring things off the Internet and into the physical world in the way which the other bunch are. There were other reasons too for the split, like Paul Baloney’s threats to ‘rape and destroy’ an 18-year-old English girl who was then a troll and who had incurred this cultural critic’s wrath by refusing to meet up with him for sex; along with these other trolls taking his ex-girlfriend’s side over the harassment campaign against her family. But the pecker photo was the lit match that fell into the open box of fireworks.

Of course, many of the trolls stayed on the sidelines and continued to exert their energies into trolling only, but the damage had been done. Steadily, that once giant RIP trolling ring, which at one stage could call hundreds of memorial page desecrators onto any one page or incite that same number again to harass and bully any one individual, descended almost totally into a cyber-handbagging match which dragged on for months, maybe even for over a year. Predictably, various other little groupings and gangs emerged even within the factions for various other stupid little reasons that mean everything to petty and tedious minds but which are too moronic to bother listing here. The RIP trolling from this fragmented lot still continued, but for the most part on a much smaller and much less intense scale than before as the vipers in the nest fed hungrily on each other, their endless squirming and spitting and biting being done over a cacophony of countless tales of betrayal and allegations of homosexuality all of which just began eventually to sound in my mind like a white noise. It got to a stage where for a while I couldn’t really tell one of them from another, I just gazed at it all and perceived it as something like a creature that is an abomination and out of which comes simultaneously hundreds of grunts and oinks as it constantly and without rest nor reason wrestles itself into an endless myriad of ugly and stupid shapes.