Inspired by a real survivor’s account.

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Understanding an internet troll

Farya Yunus works as a researcher at a market research company in Taman Tun Dr. Ismail. Being a researcher often means she is naturally curious about various social issues that affect her as a Malaysian woman in her twenties. So it doesn’t come as a total surprise when she decides to join an online closed group that discusses alternative religious views such as atheism and agnosticism on Facebook.

Despite the contentious nature of the topic, the group has already managed to attract close to 100 members, a mixed-gender community consist of mostly young middle-class urban Malaysians who grew up in fairly westernised upbringings.

Farya observes that the discussions in the group can be robust sometimes, but it typically confines itself to conversations between the same three to four members who seem to be perpetually active online. Many of the discussions revolve around the philosophical aspects of atheism, agnosticism and free-thinking. Nothing significantly interesting but yet has the ability to impart educational values at times.

After joining the group for about five months, Farya begins to notice one particular member with the username Minah Fatimah who is constantly and deliberately posting inflammatory comments that are not necessarily related to atheism or agnosticism. By then, Farya has been on the Internet long enough to recognise Minah Fatimah as what many netizens would term as a troll. She understands that trolls get off from reading the reactions of people to comments they make. Therefore, their principle mission is to make their comments as offensive as possible, with the hope of inflicting as much discomfort, anger and humiliation on their targets. The comments do not even have to be logical or relevant. They only need to be hateful and hurtful.

While most people on the group manage not to bite the bait, there are a few who has bothered to respond to Minah Fatimah’s comments; many presumably out of boredom with the exception of one person, Yazid Azzat, whose engagement with Minah Fatimah appears to come from a well-meaning place. One can see that he tries to stir the discussion into a meaningful discourse. However, the harder he tries to get Minah Fatimah to listen to reason, the more he sends the troll in her on a field trip along with a nicely packed picnic basket.

Anyone can see that it is only a matter of time when all hell will break loose once Minah Fatimah succeeds in locating Yazid’s weak spot, inevitably turning him defensive and combative. When that happens, she holds him at the precise spot where she wants him to be.

Minah Fatimah: You must be lost and your faith is weak for you to be in this group. You are one of those Muslims whose balls are perpetually sucked by dogs and you like it so much that you have no desire to leave your faith.

Yazid Azzat: You make no sense at all! First you said my faith is weak and then you said I have no desire to leave my faith. You need to make up your mind.

Minah Fatimah: Errrr….I’m not the fucking guy who thinks Allah, is the one and only God. Anyone who believes in that by default has neither sense nor sensibility in them. Anyway, you are a hypocrite. Everyone here knows you like to suck dicks and fuck young boys’, while your God enjoys watching it from above.

Yazid Azzat: OMG, can you just listen to yourself?! Who are you?!

Everyone else on the group tend to observe these heated exchanges in silence. Farya, on the other hand, would occasionally try to break up the argument by urging them to calm down, especially when she senses the hostility and tension between the two escalating or spinning out of control. Of course, none of her attempts is ever met with success seeing how her voice, represented by one or two liners only, gets drowned in a turbulent sea of mockery, hate, fear, anger and defensiveness.

Feeling defeated and fed-up, Farya hits the report button beneath each comment made by Minah Fatimah in the past 30 minutes and logs off her Facebook account.

She decides it is time to detox and give social media a break.

“Please say it is not true”

About a week after Farya stays away from Facebook, she finds herself rudely woken up by the frantic sound of her phone beeping on an early Sunday morning. As soon as she thinks it is the last beep, an eruption of customised digital sound ensues like a fireworks display at KLCC on New Year’s Eve.

Still feeling disorientated from the lack of sleep as result of partying hard the night before, she curses under her breath, “Who is texting so early this morning?! It’s Sunday for fuck sake!”

It takes her a few seconds to hoist herself up to reach for her phone lying on the bedside table. She gasps as soon as she sees the number of WhatsApp messages that has been bombarding her phone since two minutes ago. Looking outside her window, it dawns on her how early it must have been since morning has barely even broken yet. Her brightly lit phone screen shows it is only 6:12am.

The first text she chooses to read comes from her colleague, Sandra. There are only three messages from her. The rest of the 23 messages come from Fairuz, another member she met at the closed group on Facebook, and maybe about three to four other texts from several unidentified numbers. She’ll deal with Fairuz and the rest later.

“Hey, you awake?”

“Click on this link asap – looks like you are in big trouble.”

“Please say it’s not true.”

Farya clicks on the link and what pops up appears to be a blog post. At first glance, nothing looks unusual, except for the blogger’s choice of tacky background theme and font. It is obviously a nondescript blogger with a name she has never heard of before – Pejuang Harimau.

She quickly scans through the article without much interest until a PowerPoint thumbnail with an old photo of her catches her attention. She has used the photo as her Facebook profile about a month ago, and remembers receiving a fair bit of thumbs up and encouraging comments here and there, complimenting her lovely smile in spite of the neon-coloured braces she has only begun to wear a month ago.

By now, her curiosity has consumed her and she clicks on the file to find out what the content could be. To her horror, the PowerPoint slides reveal all sorts of private information about her, peppered with various accusations aimed at assassinating her character.

Looking through the slides, she could not believe how a copy of her national identity card, work address, mobile phone number, names of her parents and younger sister, marital status, educational background, voter information and social media accounts, could appear on the blog for the whole online world to see.

What is going on? Why is this happening to me?

As she swipes her phone screen to reveal the next slide, a great wave of confusion, disbelief and panic start to sink into her. She gasps for air as she listens to the pounding beat of her heart while she reads every word that has been written about her on the screen.

Speechless, she leans back in a daze on her bed for what seems like an eternity before more beeps on her phone break the silence of the morning hour. Reluctantly, she opens Fairuz’s messages and begins to piece together what has happened over the last week and how it is suddenly changing her life, unexpectedly and without warning.

Mistaken identity, hacking and witch-hunting

Three days ago, Fairuz has been up all night. He struggles to finish his 1500-word essay on the implication of the fall of the Ottoman Empire. In his usual procrastinating fashion, he has been looking at some of his friends’ Facebook feed and intermittently posting a comment here and there on several private groups he has joined. In the group on atheism and agnosticism, he suddenly discovers that Minah Fatimah’s comments have disappeared completely from the group’s conversation thread. He scrolls all the way up to what must have been weeks’ worth of conversation in the group and sure enough, all Minah Fatimah’s comments have been removed, along with any trace of her username.

At that precise moment of his discovery, someone on the group posts a comment, “Hey, what happened to Minah Fatimah’s comments? It seems like she has left the group.”

Another member replies, “You think? Maybe she got kicked out by Facebook.”

Fairuz quickly types, “Whatever it is, good riddance! LOL.”

In the subsequent days that follow, all the group could talk about is the mysterious disappearance of Minah Fatimah. Various speculations have been made but many seem to end up agreeing to one claim that Minah Fatimah is most likely an anti-Islamic middle-age Chinese man, with a penchant for stirring shit among the Muslim community while dealing with the frustrations and resentment of unemployment, obesity and receding hairline. This version retains its popularity until one user begins to notice Farya’s short but also persistent comments in places where Minah Fatimah’s comments have previously been. Now with all of Minah Fatimah’s comments gone, Farya’s become visible and look almost as if she was carrying a conversation with Yazid directly.

In the string of WhatsApp messages Fairuz has sent to Farya on that early Sunday morning, he explains that words have leaked out on the group that she is the person disguised as Minah Fatimah. According to him, in addition to the blog post that Sandra has shared with her, a Facebook page that has been created to “lynch” her has gone viral. Fairuz suspects that her email account must have been hacked by Pejuang Harimau, a well-known hacker among the online Malay community, where her private information must have been illegally obtained.

For almost one month, Farya finds herself living in constant fear. If hell indeed does exist, this must be it, she thinks. What has she done to deserve the countless death and rape threats from strangers on her phone and Facebook account?

“I feel the world has become so dark and I am drowning in sadness.”

“Some wanted to rape me. Some wanted to kill me slowly until I die a horrible death.”

“Some called me a whore and animal names.”

“Some even said I was born because my Mother had sex with a dog.”

“What was my crime to receive such hate?”

These are the thoughts that come to Farya’s mind during that very dark episode of her life.

Support comes in unexpected ways

Farya recalls the obstacles she has to go through when reporting the incident to various authorities such as the Malaysian Commission on Multimedia and Communications (MCMC), police and Facebook. She is told by MCMC that the commission has no power to prosecute and that she has to lodge a report with the police.

At the police station, she is told, “For us to take these threats seriously and to commence an investigation, the threats must be specific. Specific means, if someone says he is going to kill you, he needs to state when and where. So for instance – I am going to kill you tomorrow while you are sleeping in your room at (whatever address you live in). Faham?”

None of her report to Facebook is ever met with a response or action although she has always suspected that Minah Fatimah’s account may have been deleted by Facebook after many members of the online group eventually confess to reporting her abuses to Facebook. This could possibly be the reason why the username and comments are removed abruptly.

Although she suffers the indignity of explaining her situation to her employer, Mr. Fernandez, who has called her into his office the day after the incident occurs, she says that the most unexpected support has come from him. According to Mr. Fernandez, he learned about the incident after his son asked him whether he has an employee named Farya binti Yunus, who has been announced as public enemy number one on Facebook by a group called Pejuang Harimau, notoriously known for their regular online exposé of those they considered as murtad or apostate.

“I am a discrete man and I avoid any political scandal at all cost, professionally as well as privately. I expect that from my staff as well. I am concerned that what’s happening to you may change that. However, I see now that you are a victim and I can imagine the trauma you are going through now. Take a week off to sort out what you need to do, and I’ll make sure no one speaks of this, in other words, gossips about it in this office. The last thing you need is to be reminded of it at work,” says Mr. Fernandez and proceeds to wave her out of his office so she can attend to her distracted mind immediately.

Until today, she has not forgotten how Mr. Fernandez’s support has given her the much needed relief and escape at work.

It never leaves you and you just change as a person

“Once your freedom has been robbed, it changes you as a person,” Farya explains to a reporter at an interview where she is asked to name the biggest impact the incident has on her since it happened two years ago.

She says that although she has not suffered any physical harm, she lives in constant fear for at least the first six months. Since none of the authorities could do anything to take down the blog post and Facebook page, and to hold Pejuang Harimau accountable for making false accusations and thus inciting so much hatred against her online, she feels exposed, insecure and unprotected.

“For at least six months, not a day went by without me checking in with my Mother to tell her that I am ok. That I am still alive. I was convinced that someone, some day, will throw acid on my face while I was walking on the street to work. Many people knew where I work, you see,” Farya recalls.

It has been more than two years and Farya says that while she no longer fears for her life, (only because she refuses to let fear cripples her), she has learned to self-censor when she is online. Dejected, she says, “I used to think the Internet is a space where I can express, share, learn and grow as a human being. I was so wrong. It is the scariest space I have ever been.”

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