Haterz (20 page)

Jackie Aspley, thedailypost.com

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Naheed: ‘Jackie, as your ex-husband I’ve long kept my peace. But this is it. You’ve gone too far. You had an abortion. I’ve got the paperwork to prove it. That’s why we got divorced.’

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CHAPTER SEVEN

IT TAKES A VILLAGE OF IDIOTS

T
HE INTERNET KNOWS
everything. search.me had been set up to prove it. It was one of internet pioneer Henry Jarman’s pet projects that he’d thrown himself into and then thrown himself out of five minutes later.

search.me was simple. ‘Want advice? search.me.’That was the first slogan, and that’s how it worked. You asked for advice, and the site gave it to you. Chat-app, forum, wiki, something in-between. From the early days here are the top threads:

• Should I adopt a cat?

• Is it worth repairing a toaster?

• What’s the best way to order delivery pizza?

• What the flip is an HDMI cable?

• Do fake iPhone chargers work?

• My baby’s not sleeping!!! HELP!!!

Men in sheds swapped tips with breast-feeding moms. Earnest Indian postgrads debated jam recipes with members of the NRA. In the early days, it was a success. An early review was: “Hillary Clinton once said it takes a village to bring up a kid, but when they’ve grown up, they’ll need search.me.” You know how it is. It burbled along.

Its first big hit was later described by Upworthy as, ‘This lesbian teen threatens suicide. What happens next will choke you up.’ A devout Muslim teenager in Afghanistan was outed at school as a lesbian. She ran home to kill herself before her family found out, pausing only to search.me. The site saved her life. Literally. At first it was a lesbian in Denmark, who, despite the piercings and the hair, turned out to also be Muslim, and then a whole flood of other people offering advice and heartfelt pleas. Then it was a worker at a local aid agency who had swiftly arranged a safe house for her. And then James Blunt posted a YouTube song (he later admitted, with admirable candour, he’d just got in absolutely off-his-tits and had no idea of what he’d done). But anyway, Aisha was soon safe and well and everyone felt good about themselves and could get on with talking about how good James Blunt looked playing the guitar in his pants. Even if his eyes were a little crazy and his t-shirt had half a kebab on it.

Those were the early days of search.me, when Henry Jarman was still talking it up. ‘SIMPLE. THIS IS SAVING LIVES PPL’ was one of his early statements about it.

But things shifted rapidly, especially as more people found out about it, and more journalists started to write about it (‘Is search.me Google for the people?’ was one pretty meaningless headline).

One problem is that there’s actually a fairly finite number of common questions (‘How do I poach an egg?’), but, as more people start using a service, those same questions will be asked over and over again, leading to a sense of entitled weariness from more established users (‘Im closing this post as duplicate,’ ‘Pls see earlier thread on Eggs, Poaching,’ ‘HOW MANY TIMES? WERE NOT GOOGLE,’ ‘Why does idiots never bother searching first?’ and ‘Will you please change the sidebar text from “This question gets asked often” to “This question is asked often”?’). In fact, when setting up the site, Jarman had ensured that you’d have to be visiting really regularly to see the same questions, or actively searching for them. In other words, people were using the site to go and find things to be angry about.

The other drawback is that, while common questions were common, the uncommon ones really were out there. ‘Best way to get child porn legally?’ was actually quite uncommon, but it was the classic example used against the service. When he’d set up the search.me Henry Jarman had said “No question is off-limits” and “We’ve an answer for everything.” When people started insisting he revise this, he dug his heels in, going in three easy stages from freedom of speech to censorship to ‘THIS IS LIKE THE NAZIS BURNING BOOKS.’ Underneath the CAPS LOCK he kind of had a point. He’d designed the site so that you’d only find information on child porn if you searched the site for it. Plus, he produced screenshots to show that, actually, you’d get pretty similar information to if you searched on Google. “Some things we’re not the best place to look for stuff. Child porn’s one of them,” he admitted gleefully to journalists.

But that still didn’t stop the finger-pointing. For a while it seemed as though a good way to fill in a dull afternoon at a newspaper was to unearth the more fringe questions on search.me. There was also a fair amount of deliberate trolling. Again, Jarman dismissed all this with lofty disdain. “Yeah, yeah, we’ve got recipes for cooking with faeces. But you have to go looking for them,” he said, prompting a lot of people to go looking for them.

T
HEN CAME THE
search.me suicide club. After the case of the noble Aisha, troubled teenagers flocked to search.me for help in their darkest hours. Bearing in mind what I’ve said about the community becoming intolerant of having the same questions asked over and over again, it was only a matter of time before some of the regulars became annoyed that the site which was predominantly for diets/recipes/work-out tips/porn/technical cables/cat care became swamped, in their eyes, with emoji-strewn posts from wretched goths. E.g.:

MY BOYFRIEND TOOK MY VIRGINITY, FILMED IT, SHARED IT, THEN DUMPED ME. I WANNA DIE :(

go on then

yeah. It’ll show him

search.me/painless methods of suicide

search.me/music to kill yourself to

serach.me/eatshit & DIE!!! :):)

hey, you know that video will never go away, don’t you, no matter what you do, slut?

Good point RJ. That stuff sticks to the internet like shit.

YEAH. You’ll always be TEEN WHORE.

Pray none from your school go to college with you, or it’ll go with you

Anyone posted it to your Facebook yet?

You Facebook friends with your mum? :)

32 paracetamol. And... GO!

Are you kidding? Paracetamol are IDIOTIC. Even this dumb bitch wouldn’t take them?

Paracetamol is a horrid way to kill yourself. You may wonder why you don’t see it used in suicide attempts more often in medical shows. The reason is that, a few years back, quite a few shows featured plotlines showing what an awful and horrendously slow form of suicide it was, hoping to deter people. Instead, it saw rates of attempted suicide by paracetamol
rise
.

If they can save you, there’ll probably be terrible internal damage. If they can’t save you, it may take you days to die in agony.

And that’s what happened to this teenager. Julie Dreyfuss, barely fifteen. Lying in a hospital bed, sobbing as her body slowly shut down, rejecting all the possible treatments, and screaming in pain. And worse, with her iPad by her. Reading the search.me forums reacting to the news of her attempt. And telling her she’d made a stupid mistake. She answered a few.

Her parents, by the way, visited the hospital to drop off her phone and charger. And then didn’t come back.

B
Y THIS POINT,
Henry Jarman had sold the site and moved on, so he felt fairly safe in condemning what had happened in CAPS LOCK. He also issued an open letter to the people who were running the site:

Hey Joel and Lucas,

How are things? I imagine the last couple of days have been pretty tough. My first piece of advice to you is to hang in there—search.me is a thing of real value, and you guys have done a great job in building on my foundations to make it a really vibrant community.

The problem with any community is that there are bound to be a few village idiots. They shout loudly, but don’t mean a thing. They’re only harmful when they become policemen. I know you guys hate a back-seat driver, but if I can offer a bit of friendly advice, it seems as though the wrong people have now got too loud a voice. And, as I’m sure you’ll agree, that’s a bad thing.

When we started search.me, we could keep them under control. But it’s a much bigger beast now, and our hydra has grown quite a lot of heads, and some of them are stupid. In the early days we always resisted calls to curtail the site’s freedoms, but I think we can all agree that the tragic events of the last few days have shown us that there are some things that search.me shouldn’t be offering advice on. I know there’ll be some out there who cry foul, or censorship, but I really think we should redirect any queries about suicide to organisations like the Samaritans. They’re experts. We’re just mostly well-meaning people with opinions. And some village idiots who should feel ashamed of themselves.

I hope you won’t take offence at the above. It really is meant kindly. I’ll close by reminding you of one of the few bits of Latin everyone knows is, ‘Who Watches The Watchers?’

Yours, Henry Jarman

O
NE OF THE
other bits of Latin everyone knows is ‘et tu Brute?’ Henry had neatly distanced himself from the site, offered advice he wouldn’t have dreamed of following when he was in charge, and not used caps lock once. There were some people who reckoned he’d hired a pretty good PR. Which he could afford to do. He’d made quite a lot of money from a site famous for offering kids advice about suicide.

Joel and Lucas didn’t take the advice. The wrote back the following open letter:

Hey Henry,

Why not just email us next time?

Love,

Joel & Lucas

They also issued a statement saying that they’d look into various measures, but also pointing out that, perhaps, the site wasn’t the best place to go to for advice on suicide. The problem was, just as paracetamol inexplicably thrives on bad publicity, so too did search.me. Troubled teenagers flooded it.

As a columnist wrote, ‘Suicide attempts are a call for help. Sadly, that call is now being answered by fools.’ There were four deaths directly attributable to the site. There was also one case of animal cruelty after someone washed their puppy in bleach because someone on the site told them to.

For the lulz.

At about this point, a search.me user blogged about their experience of the site. ‘Basically, everyone’s getting the wrong end of the stick. Imagine Aslan, Batman and Gandalf all in a room with Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates and some brainy chick. That’s what search.me is—you know, we’re brain surgeons for the world. We could solve real problems. The thing is, people only really ask us for jam recipes.’ Well, I was going to give them a real problem.

M
Y JOB WAS
pretty simple. I had to teach search.me something it didn’t know. The problem was, as Mrs Beeton would say, that first you had to catch your fuckwit.

This was easy. Of the people who’d goaded those kids to death there were at least six repeat offenders. All of them hid behind carefully constructed online personae, but—as with most people who were too clever for their own good—it was a fairly simple matter to track them down.

HotToddy84 pretty much selected himself. He posted on a variety of subjects, including vintage electronic keyboards and being an Englishman in Germany. Turns out, ToddyHot84 was the startlingly similar username of an eBayer in Cologne, who sold parts for electronic keyboards, and, weirdly, scented candles.

While search.me anonymises IP addresses, Wikipedia doesn’t. The Moog9000 wikipedia page had quite a few amendments from a user called HatTip84. The IP address checked out to a small IT support consultancy in Cologne. Their website listed one of their staff as a former Sodobus systems analyst called Todd Halpern. In an attempt to give their website a wacky personality it said that the Number 1 single when he was born was 99 Red Balloons. That would be in February 1984.

Todd Halpern was my man.

I could have pursued the eBay route. If I bought something from him, the chances are he’d write the return address on the envelope or dispatch note. The problem was that this would establish a connection between us.

Instead, it was easy enough to browse through the list of his employer’s clients and realise that they supplied on-site technical support for a Cologne temporary business-space company.

You’re probably wondering, by the way, why I’d picked him. My other possible marks were in America, Australia or India. That was going to show up on my passport. However, it’s a cinch to book the Eurostar, hop off at Brussels, and buy a train ticket to somewhere else in Europe without anyone having to know exactly where you are. Even buying the train ticket from Brussels to Cologne at the station in cash didn’t raise an eyebrow—it’s the kind of daft thing tourists do all the time. I spent some KillFund on a reasonably convincing fake passport from here on in. The kind of thing that was fine for fooling hotels and so on, but wouldn’t stand a hope at Border Control.

Also using the KillFund, I then hired myself a business unit in the Cologne office space company Todd supplied IT Support for and set myself up. With a false name. It was pretty easy, really. The firm hired out offices for start-ups, but also had some space available for people who just wanted to have a meeting for an hour or two. They (brilliantly) were keen to look modern, so took payment through PayPal and Bitcoin. I made a research visit, and took a tour round with the building manager to pick out my office. Access to each floor was through a PIN number. I scrambled to memorise them, and only afterwards realised the pin for Floor 5 was 7AE5, Floor 4 was 7AD4, for Floor 3 was 7AC3, and... well, you won’t be surprised that I was able to get on to the completely empty seventh floor using the code 7AG7. The basement proved trickier, but, while 7AZ1 failed, 7AZB worked like a charm.