This is some hard-hitting journalism right here. They've found some perverted, unlikable loser whom they can dogpile without consequence, and they devote nearly a quarter of an hour to his sordid little non-story.

I dunno. That was pretty satisfying.

Our search engines and websites like YOUTUBE tend to feed our preferences back to us in the hope of making the web more comprehensible, and it can have the effect of making it seem much less vast than it actually is. I was on the web for ten years before POETV introduced me to Boxxy, and thereby to 4chan, anonymous, internet memes, and a much more sophisticated idea of what a troll is. I discovered poe some years earlier through a link from somethingawful, a site that my son introduced me to.

I've still never been to reddit, though my friends at BoNews tell me that I'd love it. I think it was meant as an insult.

I don't know what kind of news show this is supposed to be, but the internet is a huge part of our culture that's still taking shape, trolls are a huge part of the internet, and the chance to question one of these fuckers face to face is pretty rare. I think this is worth fifteen minutes of cable news coverage , even if I couldn't make it past five minutes.

I went to Bo News for about 15 minutes last night. Its forum culture seems closer to Reddit than to old Poe red. How they got JSP is a mystery to me.

That is actually a pretty good troll, come to think of it.

Pretty much what I expected.

If that wasn't enough you can find what more of them look like here:

http://predditors.tumblr.com/

Oh man, that tumblr evokes the most mixed feelings.

The idea that the urge to be a scumbag is somehow more "authentic" than the urge to not be a scumbag is perversely romantic nonsense.

Also pretty well debunked by biologists.

That's not to suggest that anonymity doesn't allow people to be more fully themselves in a whole lot of important ways, but it's mostly adolescent boys who push the internet doctrine that "hate is more honest", and therefore more noble, than kindness. That's bullshit. Hate lies like hell.

The present case pretty much says it all. What was honest and genuine about this guy's "jailbait" forum? I haven't seen it (or reddit) but it seems like it was nothing but lies.

It's a gold-plated trophy for pedophilia. Pretty cool, eh?

The weird thing is that, given Reddit's influence on Internet pop culture and the Internet's influence on all pop culture, that gold bobblehead isn't actually all that far off from getting an oscar for pedophilia.