The paedophiles, the trolls and the journalist

GINGER Gorman thought she was writing a story about discrimination. But when her subjects were jailed for paedophilia the internet turned on her.

OPINION

THIS is a story about two paedophiles, an army of internet trolls and a journalist. Me.

It’s about an ethical and moral train wreck and what I salvaged from it. It’s about being afraid for my family and asking the question: Has my job put my husband and children in danger? It’s about my persistent hope – sometimes against all evidence – that society will one day be a better, fairer place.

It started like many journalistic assignments – with a seed of an idea.

In 2010, I was based in Cairns, Queensland as ABC Local Radio’s Drive presenter. I’d been observing the way LGBTI people were regularly mistreated and marginalised while going about their every day lives.

So I put a call out asking for LGBTI people who had stories to share. Among the many people who emailed me were a gay couple – Mark Newton and Peter Truong.

They welcomed me into their northern beaches home and told me at some length about how their gorgeous five-year-old son was born via a surrogate mother in Russia five years earlier. The interview I recorded on that humid Cairns day was broadcast on the ABC and posted online (heads up: that last bit is important).

In 2012 I found out the Queensland Police and the United States Postal Inspection Service – which is just like the FBI but they investigate crimes committed by post – were investigating these two men as members of a possible international paedophile ring. Indeed this was the case. The following year the couple were sentenced for their unspeakable crimes.

The article I’d written about these men in 2010 was still online. A conservative commentator in the US found it. He had thousands of Twitter followers and he incited them to shame me. Consequently, I started to get dozens of hateful and threatening tweets.

I was labelled a paedophile lover and enabler, ‘incompetent,’ a ‘dimwit’ and a propagandist for the gay rights movement.

Vile blog posts were written about me. A picture of my family appeared on a fascist website. At the time, the threat seemed omnipresent. The fear was indescribable. What does it mean when you get a tweet in the middle of the night stating: “Your life is over”? Is someone really coming for you? For your kids?

Ginger was targeted by online trolls after it was discovered people she had interviewed were since convicted of paedophilia.

Of course nowadays, everyone has heard of trolling. But four years ago, trolling public figures online was really only just emerging as a thing in Australia. It was very hard to gauge the nature of the threat. No one else seemed to know either.

Eventually I turned to Alastair MacGibbon. At the time, he was Director of the Centre for Internet Safety at the University of Canberra. He was also a former federal police officer with a background in high-tech crime. Most recently he’s been appointed the first Special Adviser to the Prime Minister on Cyber Security.

Reading his online bio, Alastair seemed like a good candidate to call for advice. And he was.

Ginger said six days after Newton was sentenced came a frightening moment. ‘My husband and I found this photo of our family on a fascist website. The fascist website called me a “bitch” and also derided the way I look. This seemed all the more sinister because this was a Nazi hate website and my mother’s parents were Jews who fled the Holocaust. There was no way to know if these people meant actual harm. We just had to sit and wait.’

Fast forward to now. Both Alastair and I appear on ABC radio together to talk these issues through (off the back of my confronting but necessary TEDx Canberra talk on the issue).

Alastair explains that when it comes to the internet, “its greatest strength is its greatest weakness.”

“The internet is a great enabler for people who have ill intent to reach people that they want to target,” he tells us.

“Law enforcement agencies, to be frank, have struggled with this…and I’m not critical of them. This technology has washed over the top of everyone in society.

“I’ve always seen the internet as a place where the rule of law and civility needs reign just as much as it does when we walk outside. And I know Ginger has that same philosophy,” he says.

It’s true. We both agree on this point. I also believe our online and offline worlds are not separate.

One of the big fallacies about the internet is that it’s somehow not real, it’s somehow virtual. If you feel that your children are threatened or that you are threatened, it’s not less real than if someone did it to you in the supermarket.

Alastair adds: “If you’ve been threatened very personally and very viscerally online, it is exactly the same as being threatened offline. In fact, in some senses, it can be worse because it follows you around.”

Despite the gloom, Alastair advises trolling victims to reach out to those around them.

“You are not alone. No matter how violent someone is towards you online and offline, there are people around you to help. Use that community support [and]…don’t respond to the person trolling,” Alastair says.

That’s right. The commonly used saying, “Don’t feed the trolls” really is true. All evidence shows trolls are sadists. This means that they want to hurt and humiliate others. It also means that if you respond in any way, you’re giving them what they want. (Mute trolls on Twitter, don’t block them because they can tell you’ve blocked them and love that they’ve managed to get under your skin.)

Ginger Gorman spoke about online trolling at a recent TEDx event in Canberra.

I need to be clear about this though. Like Alastair says, being silent to the trolls does not mean being silent to each other.

As I said in my talk, trolls desperately want a reaction and in fact rely on your wounded, angry response to ply their trade. So if you ignore them, this is not retreating out of fear but standing right here where you are. It’s strong.

Last year my strange journey led me to meet and interview serious internet trolls.

They were far more dangerous than I imagined. Most of them operated in gangs. They’d research each victim and try to find their weakest point. Then these trolls would “pile on” the victim in an unrelenting campaign of hate and fear. In some cases, these hate campaigns were even documented online. One troll was completely unremorseful when he admitted to actively trying to incite a number of people to suicide.

Reflecting on this, I then started asking – and still ask – the question: Why aren’t all workplaces protecting their staff online?

I would love to see workplaces taking this much more seriously. Any workplace that requires their stuff to be online, they must be implementing social media self-defense training. It’s an occupational health and safety issue.

For children in the thick of being bullied online, Alastair suggests you got to www.esafety.gov.au

For adults (no matter what Australian jurisdiction you’re in), go to www.acorn.gov.au

Ginger Gorman is an award winning print and radio journalist. Watch her recent TEDx Canberra talk here. Follow her on Twitter @GingerGorman

If you want to listen to both Ginger and Alastair talking trolling on the ABC’s Life Matters program, go here.