I wrote this paper for a non-fiction literature class I took. I was assigned to write some non-fiction of my own, and chose to write about my time working at a dot com. I changed the name of the company, but god knows you could figure it out easily enough. =]

I loved dotcom.com, and I was thrilled when I got a job there as a Community Action Representative. dotcom is a teen communications platform, basically a giant website with 600-plus message boards and 150,000-plus clubs serving almost 5 million teens. The job description required that I be comfortable with "the darker side of the net." No matter how precarious my grounding was in the other job specifications, I thought I was familiar with the perversions that lurked close to the surface of the Internet. After all, I'd spent my teen years on America Online, and I'd been subjected to countless amorous propositions from 50-year-old perverts. I was sure nothing I'd see on the site would shock me.

We protected the members from harm, be it physical, psychological, sexual or emotional. This meant policing the site for pedophiles, removing the purging tips that the girls on the Eating Disorders board were fond of exchanging, and removing pornography from the dotcom-hosted web pages. My first week I tackled a document entitled "The Lurker List," a huge
spreadsheet with over 500 member names that needed to be investigated. Most of the names on the list were older men who had been members of clubs on dotcom that had been deleted for being too sexually graphic in one way or another.

We went through the new clubs every day to make sure that the teens weren't breaking any of our rules. Although we allowed members to engage in frank talk about sex for educational purposes, we didn't allow pornographic chat. The rule of thumb I was told was: A member can answer another member's question about what's involved in giving a blow job, but they can't send each other jerk-off material. When a club violated that guideline, it was closed down, and then we would go through the club's membership list looking for adults so that they could be permanently removed from dotcom. Jenn, my boss, and I figured that any grownup who was in a sex club with teenagers on a teen site was at best misguided, at worst, a pedophile. Either way, he needed to be directed elsewhere.

I had to investigate each of the 500 lurkers and document their online activity. This involved figuring out what their approximate age was, whether they had any other dotcom accounts, what Internet Service Provider (ISP) they were using, and what their contact email address was. And for each suspect, we had to document at least one specific and verified example of
inappropriate online behavior. We needed copies of their postings for ammunition, because many men, when they were asked to leave the site, would respond by threatening to sue us. But once confronted with their own words--"Older daddy looking for daughter to discipline," screen names such as "HairlessCunt" and "Stiffie4U"--they dropped their lawsuits posthaste. After I had added the information about each lurker to our spreadsheet, I would delete their accounts and then send an email asking them to kindly never come back unless they wanted to face criminal prosecution. My alias on dotcom was "Fersure," which didn't sound very intimidating, and neither did my boss's screen name, "Little_Otis." So we came up with an imposing Italian alter-ego, Anthony Loporto. We made a fake staff account on dotcom and created a sham profile for Loporto, saying that he was an ex-cop in his fifties who had come to work for dotcom as chief investigator. Whenever I sent threatening letters to perverts, I always sent them from Loporto's account. Instead of writing in the teenybopper voice of "Fersure," I had to use vaguely threatening, gruff cop talk of "Loporto." He even had his own voicemail at dotcom (with a robotic message), but of course he never returned the calls he got-he always wrote back.

While going through the lurker list, I found a particularly heinous fellow. He was a member of over 50 sex clubs on dotcom and listed oral copulation as one of his hobbies, and he was pursuing several young girls on line. I went into his account to see what he was up to and found an email from a 16-year-old girl saying that she would meet him in front of a certain building in Delaware at 5:00 p.m. I went into her account to see his half of the email correspondence, and it soon became clear to me that he had met the girl on dotcom and that his intentions were sexual. He had listed his age on the account as being 27, but on the first five accounts he created he had admitted to being 45. I looked at my watch; it was 2:00 p.m. In three hours this pervert was going to meet up with some naive girl and probably rape and kill her. We'd never faced this situation before, and I decided to send the girl an email warning. But for legal reasons I wasn't allowed to say anything about the contents of his other private emails or my view of his character, and I was terrified I wouldn't be able to get my message across to her. I felt powerless: I was the good guy, but I had to follow the rules. I told her he was under investigation and hoped she'd read between the lines. Then I
waited for three hours to see if she would sign on.

When she finally did, she sent me a blase note thanking me but adding that she "probably wouldn't have met up with him anyway." I knew she was lying: I was looking at five different emails she had sent agreeing to the meeting and setting up a time and a place. I wanted to throttle her. Obviously she was unaware of the hysterical anxiety I had worked myself into over her well-being. This must be what being a parent is like, I thought, saving ungrateful brats from themselves and barely getting a word of thanks. But at least I knew she wasn't going to meet him, and that made me feel that at least I had protected one girl for one more day.

When I first started this job, I thought I was going to be regarded as a hero. But the rest of the company didn't see it that way. I soon learned that those of us who worked in Community were pariahs within dotcom, because we were the only department that did not generate revenue. Moreover, even within my department my boss and I were seen as oddballs because we dealt with sex and looked at porn all day. What we did wasn't heroic; the others figured that anyone who would even do this kind of job had to be a weirdo. I thought I had already seen enough porn to become desensitized, but this job made me realize that I wasn't. When moderating the web pages we hosted on dotcom I sometimes found child pornography. Seeing these pictures brought me close to tears; they just made me feel like the world was a bad place. At least I was doing something about it, I reasoned. That was the only thing that made it bearable: reporting the men who were publishing these pictures to the FBI. It happened enough times, though, that I became used to holding my hand over the screen to cover up the dirty bits while looking these children in the eye to try to assess their ages. I would zoom in on their faces and try to gauge if this was an extremely undeveloped 18-year-old or a bona fide 11-year-old. I would go home from work numb, unable to explain to anyone how I felt. How do you talk about stuff like that? How do you explain that the reason you don't feel like going out is because you were looking at
pictures all day of a pre-teen being sodomized?

A real coup for me came during the Sex Questions sting. There was a message board on dotcom called Sex Questions that was a haven for perverts. The pace of the board was so fast that posts would appear at three times the speed we could read them. So we tended to moderate it only minimally. A large, loose-knit group of men had made this message board their home, and we decided we had to boot them all at the same time. It took a lot of work and coordination, but we finally got the logistics all into place, and one day we kicked them all off and sent them threatening letters telling them never to come back. Some of the men slunk off with their tails between their legs, but many rebelled against our intrusion into their little world; they made new accounts as fast as we could delete them. One man called dotcom's CEO and complained, wrote my boss, Jenn, at least ten lengthy letters and offered to
come visit us in the office to work it out in person. We were sure he was going to come in and shoot us. Another guy made me crazed with anger. Every morning when I came in I would have to scan the site for new accounts of his, and then throughout the day I would delete his posts. This was an adult man, who was at work, posting on a teen site and chatting with teenagers about his genitals. His screen name was even "Erexshin." I finally gathered enough information to contact his ISP and ask that his access to our site be terminated. Since he was connecting from his place of employment, I was actually calling his job and telling them what he had been up to on our site. His employer's response was gratifying. Of course they didn't take me seriously at first, but once I sent them a copy of an email he had sent in which he described his "pre-cum" dripping down the leg of the chair at his workstation, they took instantaneous action. They had to take his Internet Protocol address and determine exactly who he was-up until then we only knew him as "Erexshin"--and confront him with the evidence of his misdeeds. He was terminated on the spot. I had fought a pervert, and I had won.

Maybe I had won a battle, but it was more and more apparent that I was losing the war. One man emailed extensively about his real-life experiences molesting small children and sought to meet up with young boys on dotcom, but when I contacted the FBI they told me that there wasn't enough evidence to take any action. Most ISPs never even bothered to return my phone calls, and most perverts that were removed from dotcom were back within a week or two, and we didn't have enough manpower to keep up with them. There were so many of them, and only two of us.

It only got worse. Three months after I started at dotcom, 20 percent of the staff was laid off, including half the Community Department. Now those of us who were left had twice as much bureaucratic paperwork, and protecting members from the perverts was put on a back burner. I felt like I was spitting into a black hole. I had no idea what affect I had, or if any of these men were being scared off, if they were touched in any way other than masturbatory. When they disappeared from dotcom, most of the time I couldn't tell if they had stopped chasing teens for good or had just moved to another site-or were back on dotcom under another identity that we didn't have time to track down. Sometimes I wondered if maybe acting out these pedophiliac fantasies online made them less likely to molest a child in real life, or did it encourage them to bring their fantasies to life? And I couldn't help feeling angry at the kids they preyed on, for being so stupid and eager to be exploited. I didn't know why the teens that these men were bestowing their affections on seemed to resent it when I stepped in to stop them. I just didn't know if what I was doing served any purpose, and it was making me miserable.

So when they told us one Wednesday that 50 of the remaining 130 people at dotcom would be laid off that Friday, I asked to be one of them. Thankfully, I was. It makes me sad, thinking of the hero I thought I was going to be when I started, and realizing that what I did made no difference whatsoever.