6 Online Trolls Who Are (Almost) Too Creepy For Words
Although it started out as an experiment in friendliness and connectivity, the internet has since become a battlefield where you can get bombarded with death threats, dick pics, and worse, all because you disagreed with some blog post. But there were supposed to be rules. No pets. No elderly. No kids. You know, like the mafia. Except in recent years, it seems that not even children are safe from being used as hate-pinatas for the internet's scum. For example ...
Creepy Men Are Hacking Baby Monitors (And Talking To The Kids)
Let's picture the scene: It's 7 p.m., you've finally put the baby down, and you're about to enjoy your weekly two hours of uninterrupted sleep. Then, as you drift off to half-a-glass-of-wine dreamland, you hear it -- an adult voice coming from the nursery. With a strength equivalent to 12 Incredible Hulks and wielding a throw pillow like a flail, you burst into the room to confront the intruder ... who isn't there. That's when you realize: The voices, they're coming from outside the house.
This isn't the start of a horror movie, but what could happen if you've bought a WiFi-connected baby monitor or camera but forgot to change the default password. Some creepy asshole could easily hack into it and start sleep-harassing your child. One mother from Ontario was rocking her baby to sleep when eerie music started playing through the monitor and a possibly/definitely insane person told her they were being watched. In Houston, a nanny was startled mid-change by the monitor commenting that the baby had a "really poopy diaper." When she confronted the parents about their little prank, they had no idea what was going on. In another case, one couple was awakened by the sounds of someone screaming at their baby to wake up, pausing only to cuss out the father when he moved to unplug the device.
The real daddy's foot was later looking for that guy's ass.
But possibly the worst case of infant cyberbullying was in 2015. One family started having some difficulties with their son, who was claiming that a man was talking to him at night. A slightly more nuanced story than "there's a monster underneath my bed," but the parents didn't buy it. One fortuitous night, they caught someone whispering "Wake up little boy, daddy's looking for you" to their son over the monitor they'd installed in his room. They immediately unplugged the device, though burning down the house and salting the earth would have also been a valid response.
Of course, it didn't take too long for these baby creepers to find each other and set up a cozy little hive. After one family found that their monitor was playing unsettling and mysterious music (which surely is all music that inexplicably seeps in through a baby monitor) they managed to trace the IP address of whomever had accessed it. To their surprise / utter disgust, they discovered a whole goddamn website of people dedicated to plugging themselves into baby monitors, allowing perverts and sociopaths with only grandma-ish levels of tech literacy to create someone's nightmares.
"There's at least fifteen different countries listed and it's not just nurseries -- it's people's living rooms, their bedrooms, their kitchens," she explained. "Every place that people think is sacred and private in their home is being accessed."
Change those fucking passwords, guys.
Trolls Inflated The Number Of Kids Missing After The Manchester Bombing
On May 22, 2017, some deranged asshole blew himself up in the foyer of a Manchester Arena, which killed 22 concertgoers, wounded hundreds more, and plunged the city into pandemonium. The emergency services and an army of everyday heroes rushed to the devastated site, whilst social media was abuzz with people organizing shelters, transport, and ways for people to get in touch with their missing loved ones. However, this young man wasn't one of said missing loved ones:
This dapper fellow is John, or TheReportOfTheWeek. He lives in the U.S., reviews food on YouTube, and is definitely not the brother of whatever anonymous fuckwit posted this moments after the attack. His picture was one of many Google Image grabs some ghouls were using to bombard the Twitter hashtag with made-up stories of victims. Among the people whose images were used to sow chaos for laughs were some internet celebrities, very Googleable handsome randos, and, because the world is dark and full of terror, a bunch of disabled child models.
Making a "Hey, I wasn't really killed in a terror attack" vlog probably isn't something that he was anticipating for his food review series.
When someone tracked down one of the shitheads responsible, they remarked that really, it was the media's fault for not carrying out basic due diligence in publicizing the identities of these "missing people." Yeah, stupid media -- i.e. random everyday people on Twitter and Facebook -- for believing that nobody would sink low enough to intentionally distract people from helping others during a terrorist attack for their own entertainment. Always count on trolls to prove that we all have too much faith in humanity.
Griefers Are Destroying Kids Minecraft Worlds
Griefers are people who have fun playing video games by making sure other people aren't having fun playing video games. Their techniques range from destroying player homes to spamming games with pixelated dicks and swastikas to trying to get others banned to taking over people's servers. They lie, destroy, and cheat -- whatever it takes to rob people of the pleasures they themselves can't feel in their empty hearts. And the weaker the player, the easier it is to grief them. Like children.
Griefers targeting kids are the worst of the worst. If they can get a small child to give up on their favorite game, they've won. What they win, we can't begin to guess; we're not criminal psychiatrists. However, we know that the real payoff comes in the form of YouTube videos complete with the high-pitched voices of unhappy kids. And the most popular of all are the Minecraft videos. Since entering the mainstream, Minecraft has become very popular with children, which has infuriated plenty of older players -- probably because they make it harder to pretend that Minecraft isn't just millennial Legos.
Minecraft griefers will pretend to be reviewers from gaming sites so they can lure kids into letting them into their space. Once they've infiltrated, they proceed to crash servers, destroy buildings, imprison characters, and basically act like your asshole brother who ruined your pillow fort after you spent a month building it. But as if that kind of cruelty isn't enough, they then record and publish those children crying on YouTube for the enjoyment of thousands of morally bankrupt human joy-vampires -- or teenagers, as we typically call them.
In fact, these videos are so popular that there's a cottage industry of griefers who have managed to monetize the tears of children. And while this information is enough for most of us to start praying for a meteor to come finish us off like the dinosaurs, others are fighting back. There are guides on how to protect yourself from griefers, and guides for parents on how to handle it, and surprisingly few of advise them to simply start kicking any 14-29-year-old men they meet square in the balls.
And to any kids playing Minecraft reading this: Guides are great, caution is better, but knowledge is best. And know that you've already won, because you're eight and you're already better at life than these sad, sorry, C- cyberbullies.
YouTube Is Crawling With Horrific Gory Remakes Of Kids TV Programs
If you still think bronies are creepy, get with the program. This is 2017, when adults jacking it to rainbow-colored ponies are boring because they aren't trying to actively scar young children with their mental issues. Not like the new trolls on the block, who intentionally want to traumatize kids via reimaginings of their favorite cartoons all gored up.
Take Peppa Pig, of Peppa Pig fame. On YouTube, there are tons of videos masked as clips from the real show which in truth feature Peppa being put through grotesquely violent things without warning. In one video, Peppa is accosted by a psychotic dentist, who rips her teeth out as she screams in agony.
Another video features Peppa being kidnapped, stabbed, and assaulted by groups of attackers who drag her into the woods while she cries helplessly. The animation isn't great, but that doesn't make much difference if you're three and want to see your favorite pig not be molested.
There are hundreds of examples like this. Popular characters from the likes of Frozen, Thomas The Tank Engine, Despicable Me, Sesame Street, and many others unwillingly star in animated snuff videos. And before you remind us of the fun of Happy Tree Friends, this isn't meant to be enjoyed by weird adults like us. With channel names like "Toys and Funny Kids Surprise Eggs" (its videos have over five billion views), part of the fun is clearly imagining scores of small children stumbling upon these freak shows and crying all the way to the therapist's chair.
Stormfront Is Tricking Students With A Bullshit MLK Jr. Website
The "alt-right" is all about rewriting history, whether it's claiming black people couldn't be Roman legionnaires or pretending that Hitler systematically genocided entire classes of humanity as a bit of a prank, bro. They need to do this because, according to them, history has a deep liberal bias. (It's also written by the winners, so let that inferiority complex sink in for a moment.) But it's hard to convince fully formed minds to believe fucked-up white supremacist bullshit instead of legions of respected academics with carefully vetted facts. So when fascists run out of stupid, they have to target the young.
Since the freaking '90s, the Neo-Nazi website Stormfront has taken to spoofing an official-looking Martin Luther King Jr. website, full of facts and figures that they're dying for kids to red pill the playground with -- including that time he beat up prostitutes, conspired with the Communist Party to take over the country, and cheated on his wife.
They even have flyers! Great for when you want to recreate that opening scene from Die Hard With A Vengeance.
The website, http://martinlutherking.org, is designed to entrap lazy students with overdue book reports who'll take the first source Google hands them. And it works. It's such a problem for teachers that they have to keep reminding their students that the official website of this national hero doesn't call him a "beast" and blame his promotion on the all-powerful ZOG.
It's weird that many young people don't question why the guy's official website was calling for his federal holiday to be cancelled, but they were probably too fascinated by the pop quiz which tells you whether you're a politically correct libcuck or a woke race realist who's definitely going to be assassinated by the government. But if you're looking for a comforting detail, here's one: This is a problem that's only destined to get worse. As of now, 35 percent of students are handing in homework assignment that cite spoof websites, fake news, and bullshit statistics that wouldn't look out of place at a White House press conference.
Oh wait. That wasn't comforting at all, was it?
Role-Players Are Stealing Kids Photos And "Adopting" Them on Instagram
By now, we all know to keep intimate photographs away from the internet if we don't want them falling into unwanted hands. But it's no longer just your private reel of nipples and butts that people will use for their invasive entertainment. Internet weirdos will even take the most innocent part of people's lives and tamper with it: pictures of their children.
Digital kidnapping is one of the latest fucked-up fads sweeping social media, Instagram in particular, and it's even creepier than it sounds. These pic-nappers sift through photos of other people's children and claim them as their own, writing up biographies, talking about fake hobbies and quirks, giving them fake names -- in short, turning real children into creepy internet dolls for their unmedicated pleasure.
It starts with followers who appear to come out of nowhere. They watch your account, steal the images of your kids, rename them, and claim them as their own. It's very distressing for parents, who are often unaware until they receive confusing messages from strangers who have seen their children under different names, with different parents and different lives -- lives that would make normal people want to call the cops. Here's a sample of the way role-playing works on Instagram:
BURN THE WORLD! BURN IT! LET THE FIRE REDEEM US!
With the *shudder* rising popularity of digital kidnapping, so-called "adoption agencies" have sprung up to supply photographs of attractive babies and even older children for "role-players" to claim for themselves. It might not seem too bad on the surface, but imagine being a parent and finding an avatar of your daughter online telling some grown man to stop taking pictures of her in bed. Another of these depicts a newborn with tubes coming out of its body, captioned: "My mother had me trying to kill me in the hospital bathroom. She had me and left me in the toilet. Luckily I clogged the toilet ... I need a mommy."
Some role-players are weirdly fixated on the nudity of the babies, on the sexual power they will wield as they grow up, or other creeptastic aspects of the process of raising a child. The comments aren't always kind, either. One mother found a role play pic of her five-month-old baby accompanied by jeering comments about the child being ugly and malformed. Worse still, some fake parents enjoy pretending to abuse the children as part of their story. Who knew people who steal pictures of kids and then pretend they're their children would have mental health issues?
But while digital kidnapping isn't a crime (not yet, anyway), it can be a gateway to the vile recesses on the internet. According to Australia's Children's eSafety Commissioner, almost half of the filth found on pedophilia sites come from social media. Those who role-play with other people's children are also setting up handy repositories for actual criminal degenerates to get off on. Remember, folks: This is the internet. If you can fake-kidnap a baby to take fake care of, someone else can fake-kidnap your fake baby to fake-molest it. Being a fake-parent is harder than it looks.
When they aren't planning their island cult/utopia, Marina and Adam spread the good word on Twitter. Adam also has a Facebook page and a newsletter about creepy history that only the coolest kids are subscribed to. You're cool, aren't you? Prove it.
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