He looks like a cross between V (from V for Vendetta) and the villain from the Scream franchise. But this is actually the latest social media personality, the Great LonDini, with the self-appointed aim of cleaning the corridors of social media of scammers, trolls and cyber-bullies.
Looking at the Great LonDini, you can’t be blamed for drawing comparisons to the ubiquitous Anonymous hacking collective. And just like Anonymous, the Great LonDini is a group of people all masked behind, well, a mask. And they too claim to be working towards some greater good.
So what does the Great LonDini do? The ethos here is to “take social media back from the bullies, paedophiles, scammers, and trolls” and that’s achieved by a group of white hat hackers using a variety of tools and techniques to identify offending comments made on social media – most notably on TikTok – and to uncover the real life identities of the people who made them, as well as report them to employers and law enforcement.
The spokesperson for the group, a man dubbed Leo, claims the group’s main objective is to help protect people who cannot protect themselves, according to a recent video.
It’s a popular manifesto, with the group attracting millions of followers in only a few short months.
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But it’s not been an easy ride. TikTok have reportedly removed nine accounts belonging to the Great LonDini (a cross between Houdini and Linux) for breaking the site’s terms of service.
According to an interview with the BBC, the group started when Leo’s friend’s autistic 14 year-old son died by suicide after experiencing online harassment.
According to those behind the Great LonDini, they’ve already outed a lawyer who told a police officer to “eat his gun” and a teenager who posted bullying comments on a physically disabled person’s account.
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The group states that they reveal the identities of online trolls, bullies or scammers to schools (if the offenders are children) or employers (if the offenders are adults.) If the trolling is serious, the group claim they share the information they find with law enforcement.
Despite receiving largely positive acclaim, there is a danger to what is essentially a form of vigilante crusade. The annals of social media are littered with stories of similar crusades gone awry. This includes the direct aftermath of the Boston Bombings in 2013 when authorities were hunting the then-unknown suspects, and a Reddit sub-thread dedicated to helping with those efforts unwittingly winded up accusing several innocent people of being involved. Something that itself led to cases of online harassment.
Others have claimed the group engages in online harassment and “doxing” (the posting of a person’s private and identifiable information to the public) which has given rise to a number of detractors to the online vigilante group.
The group behind the Great Londini, however, plan to continue their work against online abuse. “Until every bully racist and scammer is off this app, we’re going nowhere” they said in a TikTok video.
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