The Art Of Trolling: Inside A 4chan Smear Campaign

Last night the users of 4Chan.org’s notorious /b/ message board decided declared war on the lead singer of an obscure electro-pop band. More than 12 hours later, they’re still waging it. This is how the internet’s worst trolls works.

This week, 4Chan’s /b/ board launched an internet gang-up on an 11-year-old girl, Jessi Slaughter, who had been the target of dubious internet rumours about an underage sex scandal. They posted her real name, phone number address and social networking information and spearheaded a campaign of internet and real-life harassment. They made her cry. Satisfied, /b/’s denizens have turned their ire now on 25-year-old Dahvie Vanity, the other half of that alleged scandal. Vanity is the lead singer of the terrible electro-pop MySpace band Blood on the Dance Floor. (Sample lyric:”I’ll fuck you in the face/and leave a nice taste”) And now /b/ has sworn to destroy him.

4chan’s /b/ message board is without question ground zero for wrecking havoc on the internet. Some of their most famous pranks include sending Justin Bieber to North Korea, flooding YouTube with porn and getting 4cha.org’s founder, Christopher Poole, voted Time‘s most influential person. Often they’ll target an individual for specific trolling, as they have with Vanity.

/b/’s campaign against Dahvie Vanity – dubbed “Operation: The Consequences” – is a good case study in how these impressive and sometimes awful feats are pulled off. I’ve been following the trolling operation since it began last night on /b/, watching as it moved from the /b/ to chartrooms to the inbox of the Orlando Police department. Here’s how it’s unfolded so far:

Sometime last night after 10pm, a /b/ user posted a proposition that the board’s users troll the “paedophile” Dahvie Vanity. The board was still full of celebrations of its earlier harassment of Jessi Slaughter, so users quickly got on board – the thread exploded with suggestions and encouragement. One user compiled a document of Dahvie’s personal information – name, date of birth, links to his social networking profiles and articles about him. Someone posted a link to a chartroom. When I entered it, about 44 users were chattering in all caps about how to take Vanity down. (If you typed in lowercase a flurry of users scolded: “CAPS OR GET BANNED.”)

The early plans thrown around were the most technically ambitious, involving hacking into Vanity’s MySpace or email accounts. Since users had found Dahvie Vanity’s real name, date of birth and home state, the only thing they needed to reset the password on one of his email accounts (which one was unclear) was the answer to his security question: Name of first pet. One person posted the question to Yahoo Answers, hoping some deeply obsessed fangirl would know the name of Vanity’s first cat. Another one impersonated a fan and emailed Dahvie himself: “i just got a new cat and i wanted to name it after a pet you’ve had because i love you.” Then they posted the email:

None of these deception tactics worked. “What happened to the old 4Chan where everyone was a hax0r,” griped one user. “They’re all Tumblr fags now,” replied another.

So they decided to launch a more pedestrian attack on Vanity’s Internet reputation: The Googlebomb. Googlebombing consists of artificially boosting the number of searches for a term so it appears in Google Hot Trends. (This is how they perpetrated the Justin Bieber syphilis rumour.) The phrase in this case was “Dahvie Vanity raped Jessica [redacted]” – Jessica being Jessi Slaughter, 4chan’s earlier victim. The bomb was primed by a post on /b/urging users to type the phrase into Refreshthing, a website which can automatically Google a phrase once every five seconds.

Users also created scores of pages on the crowdsourcing service Yahoo! Answers, asking questions like “Did Dahvie Vanity actually rape a girl?”

This afternoon, talk in the chartroom turned moving the operation into real life. IRL trolling is reserved for only /b/’s most hated enemies, and Vanity had reached this level about 12 hours after Operation: The Consequences began. Throughout the night, users had decided unequivocally that Dahvie was a serial rapist and a paedophile based on nothing more than a couple of extremely specious gossip blog posts. They wanted to get him arrested. A couple of users emailed the Orlando police department, pretending to be worried parents who had heard rumours of Vanity molesting underage children. They posted the email:

One user emailed Gurl, an online community for teen girls, telling them that they had been molested by Vanity. Another had the inspired the idea to email Westboro Baptist Church, I guess in the hopes that they’ll protest outside his house or something.

And that’ basically where things stand now. 4Chan.org has been having site problems for the last few hours, so Operation: The Consequences is in a holding pattern, unable to summon the full force of 4Chan’s user base. But the chat room still has 22 users. And this is what they’re talking about:

[14:38] anonymousey: damn internet, you scary :/
[14:38] anonymousey: i would never want to be on the reciving end of us
[14:38] anonymousey: i’ll just say that much
[14:38] cyahnidde: lol same
[14:38] cyahnidde: we are like…some kind of internet hate machine

Here’s the chat room. Troll away.