July 11, 2009.
What makes a young boy living in London care about Americans in Iraq? Most kids don’t watch the news, don’t care about politics, and probably couldn’t find Iraq on a map. But on a message forum discussing America’s involvement in the Middle East, a boy, who went by the alias truthAndDare28, typed the following message on his cell phone because he did not have access to a computer; he was fifteen years old at the time:
Posted By: truthAndDare28
Posted: Jun 18 2:23 am
Location: London
they wont move because they stuff their fat faces with lard and hot dogs and feces all day they cant fight because they are a bunch of limp pricks, i pray that the day will come. let us all pray that it is soon. brothers pray together that we crush these disgusting vile military crusaders give us the power to overcome. i am ranting i know but really worked up about all this today i will post again when I have the picture to show and not before then. in two days if willing
Though Molly never found out how the boy had come to have such a hatred toward America, within minutes of reading further, her curiosity about the pictures he wanted to show was no more. In posts dated two days later, others told of truthAndDare28’s outcome. He had died thirty-seven hours after his post, on his sixteenth birthday. There was violence. At least it was quick.
As typical with Molly, the disappointment she felt because of the findings on her first day of searching made her more industrious over the next days. The initial indiscriminate exploratory investigations she had begun with were superseded by meticulous, deep searches. She methodically worked her way through the extensive list of results returned by Ubatoo. She had only needed to stumble upon the more obscure web sites, those that appeared far past the first few pages of Ubatoo’s search listings, for her perseverance to be rewarded.
The pages she encountered in these seldom seen web sites contained posts from truthAndDare28, and far worse—the same hatred, the same urgency, but with deliberate wishful plans, clarity of thought, and explicit visions of cruelty. Each link she clicked led her deeper into the realm of questioning, hate, and the promised violence that every pressing news report had assured existed. For every post that expressed radicalism from one side, it was matched by dozens of posts that expressed it from the other.
This world she had uncovered was enormous. She pursued the connections from page to page, until she found herself at private sites that she was not allowed to access, or were written in a language she did not understand. So many links she found eventually led straight to MySpace pages, Facebook profiles, and YouTube videos, each serving as little enticements and open invitations for the too curious to delve further.
These web sites provided Molly with a wealth of content to populate her web site, EasternDiscussions. Although some of these web sites devoted part of their offerings to everyday discussions like shopping, dating, and support, unlike her first sample, none shied away from encouraging debates on religion and law, often supporting, and other times vilifying, extremist viewpoints and politics.
These were the posts that made the headlines. These were the posts that immediately sprung to mind when anyone spoke of fear, when anyone spoke of terrorism. These were the messages that would make it into her thesis; everything else was too pedestrian to be interesting.
The more she read, the more convinced she became that she was on the right track with her thesis topic. As more people came online in the Middle East, the more the need existed to ensure that what they saw wasn’t just an echo of the hate for America that already surrounded them. How much did the views of a few vocal individuals, or a few violent posts, dictate the eventual perceptions of all the readers? If she could quantify the effect, her thesis would be complete.
Still, she had to ask herself, what’s the difference between doing such a passive analysis and doing nothing at all? Unless she knew how to change the opinions of the readers and posters of a message board, why bother to study them? If she wasn’t going to be in the villages helping people, she reminded herself, the impact she needed to have must be just as long lasting, just as real, and even bigger.
Could she systematically influence the readers and posters on message boards? Instead of just studying the influence of extremist individuals, could she limit their impact? Maybe it would be as simple as making sure the messages that espoused the “right” ideas always bubbled to the top so readers saw them first. Maybe it was creating a credible authority, or set of authorities, to agree on a viewpoint and then expound on it. Or maybe it was much simpler. What about studying and controlling how long messages were—did shorter or longer messages have a bigger impact? How many calls to action should be included? How many references to prayer, to power, to God? Maybe it was even easier than that. Maybe it was just about presenting the “right” messages to the readers over and over again.
All of these things had to have some impact—if she could just quantify the amount and document it, not only would her thesis be more impressive, but it would also be useful. No thesis committee could possibly question its significance. In fact, Gale would be overjoyed. This went far beyond simply measuring information effects from discussion forums. It explored how to covertly control them.
What she needed right now, though, were subjects. She needed to have a web site where people were posting daily so she could run her experiments and study the effects they had on the evolution of opinions. How else could she test whether her methods of influence and control worked?
Without visitors, as nice looking as it was, EasternDiscussions was worthless. However, attracting visitors was difficult. When people typed in relevant search terms on any search engine, including Ubatoo, her web site normally appeared in the fourth page of results or later, if it appeared at all. This meant almost nobody saw it. She was convinced that no search engine would put her web site high enough on their results pages until it became more popular. But to get popular, it either required a huge advertising budget or a lot of users. Neither of which she had. At the time, only six people had posted on the site. Of these six posters, two were real and four were pseudonyms that Molly used herself.
To take matters into her own hands, under a variety of names, she posted on other discussion forums about any and all relevant topics. In her messages, she always placed a link to a similar discussion she had fabricated on EasternDiscussions. She hoped that at least a few people would click these links and be sufficiently enticed to stay and post their own messages on her web site.
Her first post was made under the moniker Sahim Galab. She modeled her voice and tone after the more well thought out posts she had seen. Not only did this style come more naturally to her, but she also was drawn to those posts in her own explorations. Besides, she couldn’t bring herself to compose a post like truthAndDare28’s. The deceit of appearing so passionate about things she didn’t believe, especially in light of the boy’s grim fate, was too much. As it was, she already felt guilty for her excitement in wondering if anyone would take her seriously.
A conference inviting Mustafa Kawlia, an extremist supporter who was not allowed in the U.S. because of his use of video messages that encouraged aggressive actions in the U.S. and Europe, had been announced. Numerous online discussion forums were teeming with fervent posts supporting the right for Mustafa to speak, as well as the opposite—soliciting violence against him if he actually stepped onto American soil. She needed all of these people on her own web site if she was going to get enough subjects for her study. In three forums on popular web sites discussing Mustafa Kawlia, this was what she posted:
The right for Mustafa to speak must be respected. Anything less will only lead to more distrust from both sides. I do not understand why so many insist on trying to stop Mustafa from coming. Do you believe that as Muslims we cannot judge for ourselves whether he speaks for us? What do you take us for? You can see for yourself what he has said in the past (video1, video2). His words are severe, yet he has never told anyone to act violently. With or without him, it must be up to us to decide the actions, whether violent or not, we will take. To remove that choice from our hands is unacceptable, and I fear that it plainly forces us to one course of action over the other.
—Sahim
The advertisement for EasternDiscussions was subtle—it had to be in order to be effective. The links video1 and video2 went to pages on her web site that discussed the videos. She had created these fictional discussions between Sahim and other, more fanatical, imagined characters. Though the actual links to the videos were included on her pages, she hoped the discussion that users would first encounter would convince them to join in the fray and post their own arguments.
The idea worked, but only a little. Within a few days, she had twelve more real visitors to her site. But there were still few, if any, postings. Who would bother to write something if there was no one to read it? But she was patient. Within a week, there were forty-eight people on her message board who had posted more than eighteen messages in a single day. She was excited. It was small now, but this could be the first sign that traction was building. She eagerly shared the news with Stephen. But for someone who routinely dealt with hundreds of millions of users at Ubatoo, it was difficult to be enthusiastic about her forty-eight. Nonetheless, it was because of this exchange that the discussion with Andrew would arise a few days later, and a path to obtain Molly’s users would present itself. So, perhaps, it was worth this temporary disappointment.