BOB GARFIELD: On Wednesday, Time Magazine threw its annual Time 100 Gala, a party thrown for the world’s most influential people. You'd probably recognize a bunch of names in attendance. Michelle Obama was there, Oprah Winfrey, Barbara Walters. But what about Moot? Moot, real name Christopher Poole, made his way into the gala by more nefarious means than his fellow partygoers. He hacked his way in. Moot runs a website called 4chan, which has been described as the, quote, “dark, throbbing adolescent heart of the Internet.” The 4chan users hacked Time’s online poll for the most influential person, putting Moot at the top and arranging it so that the names on the list below him spelled an acrostic for – an act we can't mention on the air. More generally, some 4chan users engage in an act called “trolling,” a kind of catch-all term for the many ways to intentionally harass online communities. Writer Mattathias Schwartz spent some time reporting on trolls and on 4chan last August for The New York Times Magazine. He says that the worst behavior on 4chan comes from one specific part of the site.

MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ: Part of 4chan is this sub-board called /b/, and the behavior on /b/ is worse than almost anything I've seen on the Internet, for a couple of reasons. The first is that everyone is anonymous. The second reason is that /b/ has almost no memory. 4chan doesn't have very much money to spend on servers, so the site erases itself every two or three days, so it never really is able to study itself or get any smarter. And then when really terrible, awful things are posted to it, they usually disappear before law enforcement might come on the scene and shut them down, though they have done that from time to time.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay, I just want to put some of this in perspective. When I was a boy, my idea of a prank was to make a phony phone call in my pre-adolescent high-pitched voice and ask the person who answered the phone if they had Prince Albert in a can. That doesn't seem to be the state of the art in online mischief. Tell me about the state of the art.

MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ: Some of the worst of the worst involves pulling down your pants and whipping a part of yourself out and then taking a photograph of it held by, like, a sleeping minor’s face with a sign saying, what’s up, /b/ - and the time and date. That’s pretty bad. I wrote about a young man by the name of Mitchell Henderson. He was, I think, 12 or 13. He shot himself in the head with a rifle and then inexplicably became this phenomenon on /b/. They made up this rumor that he had killed himself because someone had taken his iPod. People prankcalled his house. Then they made little images with bullet holes in his head and broken iPods on the floor. Someone posted a dramatic reenactment to YouTube, where Mitchell lost his iPod and then went and killed himself. The further and further away it got from the actual suicide, the more of them just started to find it incredibly funny. And it got to the point where someone asked on 4chan, oh, was Mitchell Henderson even a real person? I didn't realize that.

BOB GARFIELD: Why do they do stuff like this?

MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ: They do it for fun. They do it for a sense of release. And they do it because when you’re looking at someone across a screen hundreds of miles away, you don't have to empathize with them at all. I think it’s much easier to just sort of laugh as you watch them melt down.

BOB GARFIELD: In your New York Times Magazine piece, I did see various attempts from the people you interviewed to justify their content, something that I suppose if you sewed it all together could maybe represent a troll- deology. Is there a troll-deology or, or, you know, is it just a bunch of juvenile dirt bags poking people in the eye?

MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ: There is a troll-deology, and most of the trolls are juvenile dirt bags. [LAUGHS] The reasons that they say they do it are not always the reasons that they do it. But a justification that’s often given is that by inflicting emotional pain on people through the Internet we will teach them to be less sensitive. If they learn that responding to a troll only provokes them, then eventually they'll learn not to respond and will achieve a kind of Zen neutrality. I mean, the motives behind this are really gross, and it is pretty evil just from looking at it on the face. But I think it’s important to keep in mind that it’s impossible to hurt a person through a computer. All you can do is generate words that they will then read. I mean, you can't have a fist pop out and like, you know, strangle someone.

BOB GARFIELD: Were you the victim of any kind of pranks or harassment of any kind?

MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ: Yes. After the story came out, there was a thread on 4chan’s /b/ board posting some of my old addresses, suggesting that pizzas might be send to those addresses. And then someone else chimed in, like, oh, let's get the Jew, I want to see the Jew burning. And this is something I could have called the FBI and totally freaked out, but it’s really just like a lot of teenage kids talking to each other in basements, so it didn't bother me so much. There were some Korans that wound up being delivered to my home address in Portland, Oregon, and then some folks from the Seventh Day Adventists came to my door to proselytize. They'd heard that I wanted to convert. I'd prepared my mom for incidents like this, and then she greeted them at the door and said, you've been trolled. I'm sorry.

BOB GARFIELD: [LAUGHS] Mattathias, thank you very much.

MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ: Thank you, Bob. It’s been a pleasure.

BOB GARFIELD: Freelance writer Mattathias Schwartz wrote about 4chan for The New York Times Magazine.