TROLLING - k-klassix0r or DUD, d000d.

The fact that the article fails to make an adequate distinction between trolling and cybercrime

totally otm, some of the article was ok but he threw everything in the same hopper to the point where it seemed like in moral terms a nasty flame war = the megan meier case = draining someone's bank account

I was a little disappointed at the lack of insight the article brought to the "trolls." There was that one paragraph where that guy's mother was asking the reporter to be kind to her son, and then later the other lunatic watered up thinking about "fixing" his parents. So obviously there's major mother/father issues going on with these people. A little exploration of that would be nice. It's almost like the article ignores that these people are really unwell.

I think it's pretty clear they are unwell.

The evidence is there to figure out that they are unwell. But the reporter shies away from giving some explanation, treating this more as a trend piece than a dossier.

i never understood why people got so worked up over what was apparently this one dbag's megan blog stunt, as if it were anything other than someone doing some super obvious trolling.

But the reporter shies away from giving some explanation

probably didn't want an armada of pizzas and emergency locksmiths turning up at 3am

was thinking of Dom while I read this

it's not really the point of reporting to diagnose

dude's livejournal is a trip. he thinks he's pretty smart. and for someone who's "cautious of the press" he took that (hilarious!) photo of him from the times for use as an avatar pic w/o much sense of irony

i think there's something to be said for an explanation being included, maybe one along the lines of how these dudes maybe feel they just can't get people to pay attention to them unless they just appear out of nowhere and actively fuck with them in a malicious manner (for example). b/c as it stands here their reasons are kind of boring and evasive.

he got the kid's mother on record saying he was abused and angry, what extra glossing by the writer do you need?

xp

i may be conflating the trolls here, now that i think. the kid w/ livejournal i'm referring to above is w33v (lol paranoid)

the reporter shies away from giving some explanation

I felt like he gave an explanation: "sex abuse, fucked up family life"

not sure what kind of exact cause-and-effect you're lookin for

xposts

but yes, each of these dudes, in their own way, is very careful and consistent in denying that they enjoy what their doing -- the lulz are not to be had for the self, but only as a kind of measure that they've hit a nerve (so the logic goes). we get lots of tenuous quasi-philosophical bullshit about 'waking people up.' yeah you've really cracked reality's code haven't you, kid.

it would have been nice to have the writer confront them a little more directly that they're engaging in cruelty at a remove with no risk, which, if you subtract the stephensonisms, is garden variety sadist cowardice. but you get hints that the writer was genuinely a little afraid of these kids.

Like I said, it is briefly mentioned. This is a poor analogy, but imagine if NY Times wrote an article about this new trend; young men were going around beating random people in the street. And then, instead of discuss the actual interesting thing about this (what is wrong with the perpetrators, and why they feel they need to participate in this destructive/abusive behavior), they spent the entire article writing about the "beating people culture" and giving a soap box for the people to discuss their bizarre, political explanations for their behavior.

i felt like during the interviews that they were trolling this writer like crazy, because he bought into their "mystique" rather than getting past it.

Not to mention the anti-Semitism and Racism in the "community" is entirely unparsed.

"And in the end, they were just self-important young men with sad childhoods and no morals."

i think if you got a bunch of shitkickers to sit down and explain what they thought they were up to it would sound fundamentally sick and illogical and self-protective, kind of like this article did.

xp hm yeah omar you're probably right. maybe the girl in the bentley (!? still can't believe that detail -- is the money real?) wasn't 'really' a confrontational anti-semite, the act itself is revelatory enough -- who needs to pretend to be that?

that car was a rental, guaranteed

well no doubt but i don't have the cash to even rent one, either

time to monetize challops

Like I said, it is briefly mentioned. This is a poor analogy, but imagine if NY Times wrote an article about this new trend; young men were going around beating random people in the street. And then, instead of discuss the actual interesting thing about this (what is wrong with the perpetrators, and why they feel they need to participate in this destructive/abusive behavior), they spent the entire article writing about the "beating people culture" and giving a soap box for the people to discuss their bizarre, political explanations for their behavior.

I see your point but I think when reporters do try to do this the explanations often end up being reductive and broad-brush

maybe he could have found an "ex-troll" with some remorse / hindsight / perspective

the conflation of devoted trolls and cyber criminals doesn't seem all that strange to me because their motives and justifications for their behavior are usually word-for-word exactly the same whether they have the acumen to actually commit crimes beyond harassment or not

I thought that was actually pretty cool about the article, actually, since for whatever reason I have never put spyware-writing sons of bitches and irritating b/tards on a spectrum before, though it seems obvious

Me too, and I dug the lack of armchair psychology...a natural opportunity is there for the reader to connect boyhood to full-growned man dots if so desired without all "DO YE SEE?" in yr face.

yeah if you need a reporter to tell you that these kids were all fucked up straight out the womb then you're probably a mendelian whoopsie yourself

Here's the link to Schwartz's interview this morning, if anyone's interested. Fast-forward to 7:00 in this clip. It's about 13-14 minutes long.

i do love the motives these dudes ascribe to themselves esp since there is no consistency in the "battles" they choose to "fight"

yeah it was REALLY obvious enough. i mean come on, is that really what you wanted to be reading, more speculation about their childhoods? xxxp

the quote about "fixing" his parents just fuckin said it all

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/danish-zoo-that-dissected-giraffe-kills-four-healthy-lions-1.1738109

Query in thread title never fully addressed.

classic if done well

the value of the question is not, perhaps, in the quick answering of it

!!!!

It's fine in informal communication, email, poetry, and advertising headlines. Three would be most common. Two, four, or more is rarer.

It's never "officially" correct. The people who write books about how punctuation should be used in English tolerate only two levels of enthusiasm: not enthusiastic and enthusiastic. The idea that somebody might be very enthusiastic is too alarming to contemplate.

????????

An update on Weev now that his sentence was overturned. I really don't have anything to add to this except that I think we're all screwed.

Want a bump?”

It’s not that surprising when Andrew “weev” Auernheimer offers me coke shortly after we first meet. As one of the Net’s most notorious trolls, the scruffily elfin 28-year-old is known for his provocations. He’s the former president of the Gay Nigger Association of America (GNAA), a group of online pranksters who lived up to their offensive name. In YouTube “sermons,” as he calls them, weev guzzles from a large bottle of mescaline tea and waves his gun as he rants against Jews. “We’ve got a whole fucking Internet to cover with dongs and swastikas,” he writes, “and we’ve got a whole world to fill with monuments to martyrs that the government dares call ‘terrorists.’ Let the ruin begin.”

Weev’s been called an “attention whore,” a “paranoid, anti-Semitic, pro-genocide misanthrope,” and likened to a hobbit battling “the snide, wizardly manipulators and mongrel half-orcs” from The Lord of the Rings (and that last one’s from him). But what is surprising is that he’s offering me a bump while we’re in the Brooklyn office of his lawyer, who has just left us sitting alone. Dressed in a green hoodie over a red T-shirt, with a shaggy red beard, scraggly long hair, and tortoise-shell glasses, weev huffs a line as classical music flows from his laptop. He exhales pleasurably, cleaning up just before a legal assistant comes in. “We’re working on your passport,” she tells him.

“Awesome!” he replies. “I got a jet waiting!”