Trollbaggers

Prior to her recent suicide, television personality Charlotte Dawson – a well publicised victim of internet trolling – indirectly played a role in the genesis of Twelve Foot Ninja's much-vaunted anti-cyber-bullying video. The eclectic Melbourne hard rockers broke crowdfunding records when they collected $52,600 to create their hilarious new clip for Ain't That A Bitch, setting a world record for most money raised by a band for a music video.

Axeman Steve MacKay picks up the story. “Incidentally, Charlotte retweeted one of our tweets about raising the money to make that film clip… When researching about internet trolling and trying to understand a little bit more about it, Charlotte Dawson came up. I think around the time that she retweeted our thing, I watched a couple of really awkward television news stories that she did, where she actually tracked down her internet trolls, like the people that were abusing her, and confronted them personally.

“I found that fascinating, because it was really awkward. It just reinforced that there is this weird social phenomenon where people do things on the internet that they wouldn't do in real life. These people that she confronted back-pedalled massively and they were just insipid people. They didn't have any real thought to what they were doing, or any kind of concept of who they were talking to and about.” 

Although widely praised for their efforts (enlisting a prosthetics make-up artist from The Hobbit, a seven-foot Alaskan brown bear, Penthouse “Pet” Madison Rhys and American metallers Periphery), some have taken umbrage with the gory tongue-in-cheek tale of retribution. “I've made a point not to really get too involved in the negative side of it. But what I've heard from others is that it's mainly the metal kind of purists that ironically are very troll-like in their behaviour in some of the blogs and their comments,” MacKay laughs. “I think they just sit at their computers just sort of hanging shit on stuff, that's kind of their occupation. I guess the clip struck a chord, and they didn't like it,” he chuckles again. “But that's pretty much the whole point, so yeah, mission complete.”