Fanatics and Bullies and Trolls, Oh My!... The Dark Side of the Autism Community.

There is a strange phenomenon that is happening right now in the online Autism community. I have no idea how long it has been around... certainly longer than I've been participating in online discussions concerning the Spectrum. It's something that regularly leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. I certainly had no idea of its existence until I discovered various Autism awareness groups on Facebook back in February 2009. There are many forms of it too. In fact the outrage that some of my online friends have shown me today concerning a recent incident has prompted me to write about it all here. I'm talking about something I refer to as “The Dark Side” of the online Autism community. I presume it's not just restricted to the Autistic Spectrum, but as I am so active in this particular community, this is where I have encountered it all, so this is where I will concentrate my writing. People who have encountered this in other areas are welcome to put their comments in below.

My first encounter with “The Dark Side” involved a snake-oil salesman. I shan't mention his name nor his product as I have no intention of advertising false hopes to those parents who are desperate to find that one elusive, scientifically impossible cure for their children no matter what the financial, emotional, physical or psychological cost. These are the parents that this poor excuse for a human peddles his wares to. What I can tell you is that this self proclaimed Autism specialist (who is also a specialist of other fields not even remotely related to Autism but that can miraculously be cured via the same product) came from nowhere on a very popular Autism group that I was an active member of, posting all these outrageous claims in a discussion thread that Autism was caused by diarrhoea which itself was caused via breast feeding. The more we all collectively jumped up and down and asked him logical questions, the more he went out of his way to feed the fire. Not only by insulting our intelligence, but by insulting us too. Eventually he disappeared just as fast as he had shown up. It was then that I decided to have one more look at his website where he peddles his wares to the desperate parents who might not be well informed enough to realise that he's just full of it. That's when I discovered his motives. All of our questions to him that he refused to answer in the group were now on his website in the FAQ section with his own distorted answers. Answers carefully worded to make his product look like the godsend of cure-all products, and now with no way for us who do know better to question him. Yes, we were abused to be used. He deliberately got us all outraged enough to ask all the questions that people might ordinarily query him with should they be considering buying his product. In some cases he did a blatant cut and paste directly from the conversation thread, much to the disgust of those who had posted the questions in the first place. All of a sudden our words were anonymously helping this slime-bag to deceive the buying public into falling for his remedy. Thankfully we never heard from him ever again.

My next encounter with “The Dark Side” involved a man who has since been identified as a serial troll. For those who aren't up to scratch with the lingo, a troll in this sense is a person who baits people simply to generate an outrageous response, which is exactly how the snake-oil salesman extracted his information from us. This new man however was not out to con anyone. Rather, he is someone who is so strongly opinionated in his beliefs that he hates anyone who doesn't agree with him. Again, I won't be naming the individual here. This article is not written to name and shame. It is written to show the varied types of characters that people may end up encountering from “The Dark Side” in their daily online activities. Eventually this person got so carried away with himself that he started insulting people because of their genders, and because of their sexual orientations. He even went so far as to insist that we were all the one person using a fake profile. This in itself was the pot calling the kettle black, as some online searching unearthed a few little secrets about this man including a list of his known aliases, which by a strange coincidence were also the same people who were standing up in the forum to support him. One other thing that this man did which really made me feel sick to the stomach, was to private message certain members of the group, the adults who live on the Spectrum itself. He belittled them and spoke to them like they were unintelligent babies, often taunting them just to generate a response. I've seen a few screenshots of these messages, and they are very, very disturbing.

I have since left this Autism discussion group and started my own, as the administrators seemed to have abandoned it. How do I know this? Let me introduce you to the saddest section of 'The Dark Side'. The trolls who get off by making fun of the disabled. They don't do this to research for their product like my first troll encounter. They don't do this because they're just too pig-headed to see past their own opinions like my second troll encounter. They do this because they get a laugh out of bullying and making fun of people with special needs. Occasionally I revisit the old group, and I'm dismayed with the amount of fake accounts with celebrity names, or names that mock the disabled that are happily posting insults about how all our kids are “retards” with posted photos of children who quite obviously have Down Syndrome. It's disgusting and sickening to see how low these worthless excuses for humans can be, not only insulting our Autistic children, but our Down Syndrome children too. Admittedly, the old group has had a few changes in administration since I was an active member and the new admin's are doing what they can to weed these dreadful people out, but they keep coming back with new fake accounts. Why? Because they're getting the reactions that they're looking for. People are naturally outraged by this behaviour and pipe up with how despicable those involved are. So the trolls come back again, and again, and again, with no remorse and no consideration for others, just a sick twisted mission to insult and aggravate for their own warped enjoyment.

Today I was drawn to the attention of a stranger's Facebook wall by some very concerned people. I have no idea who this person is, but he seems to have joined numerous groups on different causes which makes him look like a really great guy. But the comment he posted to his wall with a link attached saddens me and makes me think that maybe he only joined the causes so that he could do some research before doing some trolling using some fake profiles of his own. The link was to an article about an Autistic male who had been raped, and this stranger's comment simply stated how he found it all so highly amusing. That my friends, is one sick mind. To gain pleasure from someone elses pain is beyond my capacity for logical thought. Especially more that the victim is someone who this person most likely considers (wrongfully) to be mentally disabled. This man must have one of the lowest forms of a sense of humour imaginable. This must be a person who see's a homeless man in the street, and then chuckles heartily to himself as he kicks the begging cup from the starving man's hands. I find it insulting that I have to share the same planet with this person. I am happy though that my friends have brought this individual to my attention, as I can now warn my other friends to block him from their Facebook accounts.

So what can you do if you ever come across a troll? Well, from experience I can safely say the best thing to do is to bite your bottom lip and make no response at all. Make sure you tell everyone else not to respond either. The trolls feed off your outrage and disgust. It's what they breath for. Feed a troll and they'll always come back for more. It only takes one person to keep protesting and the troll will greedily lap it up. Starve and ignore a troll and they'll try harder, but eventually give up and go in search of some other poor unsuspecting group to get their jollies from. Not exactly a win-win situation, as some other poor unsuspecting group of innocents will end up having to deal with it, but to date, it's the only solution I've found. Gather up all of your friends and tell them to hit that report button. The more people who report the person's activity the more chance there is that an administrator will sit up and take notice long enough to ban the creep. If the report button doesn't seem to help then message the admin's of the group directly. If you find yourself in a group that no longer has any admin's then do yourself a favour and find a new group. Facebook no longer allows people to take over admin of an open group if there are no administrators left in it. These groups will forever remain vulnerable to attack with no way of getting anyone to ever remove the offensive people or their posts. It's a bit like going to a school that has no teachers or adults to check the bullies every now and then. Sooner or later the bullies will take over.

Having said all of that, let me also state that there are a great many good and wonderful people in the world, especially in the online Autism community. Unfortunately there is also a minority of rotten apples that spoil the orchard for the rest of us, I hope you never have to endure the displeasure of encountering even one of them. They are such small minded, uneducated people who really shouldn't be allowed to call themselves human. Absolutely disgraceful!!!