The Dangers of Troll Communities: The Case of Wings of Redemption
The anonymity afforded to one behind the internet has always caused concern for many people with wild Hollywood movies telling stories of crazy lone cyber hackers. The reality is much different as Joel Stein puts it, “The people who relish this online freedom are called trolls, a term that originally came from a fishing method online thieves use to find victims. It quickly morphed to refer to the monsters who hide in darkness and threaten people. Internet trolls have a manifesto of sorts, which states they are doing it for the “lulz,” or laughs. What trolls do for the lulz ranges from clever pranks to harassment to violent threats. There’s also doxxing — publishing personal data, such as Social Security numbers and bank accounts — and swatting, calling in an emergency to a victim’s house so the SWAT team busts in. When victims do not experience lulz, trolls tell them they have no sense of humor. Trolls are turning social media and comment boards into a giant locker room in a teen movie, with towel-snapping racial epithets and misogyny.”
In reality I believe that anonymity within the crowd of already faceless voices is what is really dangerous and what can lead to the spawning of online communities known as troll communities. The worst case being that of WingsofRedemption who has hundreds if not thousands of people continuing to troll him.
As told by his fandom wiki page; “WingsofRedemption (AKA: Richard “Jordie” Jordan) used to be a prominent figure in the infantile days of gaming commentary videos.
“He was one of the first to jump get on the wagon of adding audio commentary to video game gameplay. “Jordie” has been doing Youtube for about 8 years.”
“Due to Youtube’s neglect of their platform’s livestreaming service, it eventually grew overshadowed by the now favored streaming platform Twitch.tv to which Wings migrated to after about a year of streaming on Youtube’s platform.”
“Throughout his career as a Youtube content creator/Twitch livestreamer, Wings grew a reputation of being a lazy, lying, non-committal, no will-power-having bitch that would constantly whine and complain about everything.”
“Without fail, Richard would complain about how hard his life is whilst concurrently actively refusing to change some of the most simple factors in his life that would make his situation better.”
“Every week, without fail, Riq would complain about some silly bullshit that he could easily change, all while making thousands of dollars a week sitting in his abused chair playing video games for a couple hours a day.”
“Riq always somehow managed to find his way into some sort of drama but, somehow nothing was ever his fault. People just pick on this poor soul for “no reason”.”.
“The notoriety that Riquardo gained for being a scumbag piece of dogshit led to Youtube channels surfacing whose sole intention was to highlighting his fails, lies, stupidity and overall asshole-ish behavior.”
“In the current chapter of the WingsofRedemption story, Rich consistently gets fucked with during his livestreams, cries, and somehow gets got by ludicrous sophomoric jokes. He really is a dull-minded twit.”
Crowd behavior & The Real Life Consequences of Trolling
As with new technology comes new dangers, we have seen a new online community centered around livestreaming and the dangers that come with it. Tyler Barriss as of November 2018 was sentenced to 20–25 years in prison for making false reports by phone, otherwise known as swatting.
The otherwise seemingly harmless and funny jokes wings’ troll community revolved around escalated slowly culminating in the swatting of wings himself.
Not only has Wings been swatted but more recently his troll community has began to send people to his doorstep under false pretenses. Namely, making mechanics drive out to work on a car which does not need work or sending a prostitute off of the internet to his house.
In one of his interactions with his trolls, Wings asked how they were able to always get online and mess with his streams no matter what the time of day it was. Tellingly, one of the more prominent trolls stated simply, “I’m not the only one dude… there are a bunch of people who have my profile.”.
In this interaction we get to see how the trolls are able to keep the facade of it being a main core group of trolls, when in reality you don’t know who is behind the username at all times. This becomes important when taking in how crowds of people behave.
In the section The Minds of Crowds in his work The Crowd, Lebon (1895) claims in the section entitled, “The Opinions and Beliefs of Crowds”, that opinions of crowds are based on both remote and immediate factors. Lebon goes on to describe how a crowd is separate from an individual who is a part of it. Lebon also specifies that once an individual becomes part of a crowd, they are oblivious to their actions.
Also an important dynamic to take into account is addressed in the Scapegoat, Girard (1989) which focuses upon the how and why a collective mind is capable of perpetrating persecution of a certain crowd or peoples. The crowd, according to Girard, identifies a ’accessible cause’ that will allow it the to use violence and will view an individual or a population as a threat to society.
Unsurprisingly, these two dynamics still take affect over the internet in relation to humans but in a more abstract and potentially dangerous way. The anonymity between the crowd and the person is only further increased online, as shown by trolls accounts used by multiple people who presumably have protected IP addresses.
The near absolute anonymity coupled with the ability to use violence against innocent unsuspecting people has created a problem we have to address. In her article in The Verge, Katherin Cross states; “As we reflect on this rising wave of internet-facilitated abuse, we should conclude by reflecting on why swatting happens in the first place. Part of its appeal is theatrical: you swat a streamer and then reap “lulz” from seeing a SWAT team burst into their living room or bedroom live on their webcam. But especially for the more vicious harassers that stew in fan communities, it’s a SWAT team’s capacity for violence that really appeals. The police are an extension of their will, a physical manifestation of all the power they think they’re owed. They can hurt people they dislike, or at the very least damage their property — not to mention their sense of safety — with a publicly funded battering ram. With one phone call, they can wield the lethal weaponry of law enforcement like a cudgel in their personal, petty disputes. And as is so often the case with American police, those guns might just go off.”
Dealing with trolls going forward
WingsofRedemption is not the first and will not be the last person be swatted. Unfortunately, he is part of an ever growing grow including politicians, prominent activists on twitter, among others. What we can do to protect these people who are vulnerable to swatting is support the passing of legislation which would harshen the penalties for swatting calls.
In January 2018, Rep. Katherine Clarke from Mass. introduced a bill which would make swatting illegal explaining the goal of the legislation being, “One of the issues we are trying to address with this legislation is that these calls can happen from anywhere. And, of course, one of the powers of the Internet is its ability to connect people. But when these calls come in from across state lines, sometimes even internationally, a federal law is going to help us with jurisdiction issues so that prosecutors and law enforcement have the ability to address crimes that take place in different states and, perhaps, even different countries.
And it’s also trying to tailor a piece of legislation for this specific crime as we see swatting being used, unfortunately, more and more across the country and be able to really use our criminal statutes to address this particular crime that we’ve seen go from online abuse into real life with real consequences for people at home.”
The menace posed by internet troll communities and the collective power that they have from behind a computer screen is something that has ruined an increasing number of peoples lives. The law will play catch up to the times, but of more importance is that we recognized the potential harm these mass unidentified groups have because as Jessica Moren (former head of community of Reddit) puts it, “The idea of the basement dweller drinking Mountain Dew and eating Doritos isn’t accurate,” she says. “They would be a doctor, a lawyer, an inspirational speaker, a kindergarten teacher. They’d send lovely gifts and be a normal person.” These are real people you might know, Moreno says. There’s no real-life indicator. “It’s more complex than just being good or bad. It’s not all men either; women do take part in it.”
