Like all good disaster movies, the story of how Ron (not his real name) came to be trolled by a private group of more than 50,000 women starts one sunny Sunday with a stroll and then a lunch date.

He was a Shire boy, she was a former bikini model. They had met on Facebook and agreed on a date in Cronulla, the southern Sydney beach enclave where he grew up.

He was 33, she was 10 years younger. He worked 12-hour shifts, had a mortgage, a red SUV, a Tinder profile, a receding hairline, and a trucker hat.

One day he had seen a "nice looking girl with a pretty smile" on Facebook, sent her a random friend request, and they started chatting. He had broken up with his ex about 10 months earlier, and he didn't rate his chances of meeting a girl offline.

"I believe in chivalry," he said of that day in October.

I picked up the pay cheque. She didn't eat much of hers. I took home the leftover salad."

The date went badly. Nothing major, but that night they agreed to leave it there, take it no further, and it seemed that was the end of things. Except the next morning Ron messaged her to say that she did not look like her photos and he had been misled. Things kind of snowballed and soon enough he was fielding a ton of Facebook hate. He had been shamed as a "balding beer bellied mute little c*** of a man" on Bad Girls Advice - an Australian all-girl private Facebook group of 50,000 members.

Share Facebook

Twitter

Mail

Whatsapp Bad Girls Advice rant.

"I'm certainly not bald yet," Ron said, when Hack met up with him about four weeks later.

"I don't know where they got this beer bellied thing from either."

There's a few things to follow up: how Ron found out his face was all over a private Facebook group, what he did next, and what the group admins did next. Then there's what Ron's story tells us about online dating etiquette, lynch mobs, the subculture of Queensland-based boys-only and girls-only groups, each of them with their own staunch, binary gender identities; a peek inside these rooms with their leaders and snitches and confessions and sworn loyalty.

Things go wrong

When Hack took the train to the Shire one evening, to interview Ron, he arrived with a page of points he wanted to make and a reflective take on "social media and feminism". We drove to the Esplanade, got out the car, and walked to the restaurant strip where Ron blanked a guy he knows, some old grudge, something to do with an ex-girlfriend.

"Yeah Sutherland Shire being a small and family orientated area, people get to know each other quickly," he said. "Social media plays a big part of it."

Ron is old enough to remember when online dating was lame and sad, and he doesn't want to come across as some Tinder tragic. But the times have moved on and picking up girls the old fashioned way is now so boutique it's called "organic dating". You can imagine these sorts of retro activities still happening at the Cronulla RSL, but Ron doesn't have time. He's commuting or he's working. He's living with his mum and grandmum. He's a case study in time-poor online dating - a 30-something shiftworker who has been isolated by the work pressures, the money pressures of the Harbour City.

Mostly he wants to date friends of friends, someone he can trust, to stay on the shore and avoid the 'catfish' - the fake profiles, the people who pretend to be someone they're not. Generally, he seems to find social media a bit scary, but he can't keep away.

More than the hate messages themselves, he's nervous about someone in his community recognising him as the dude from the Facebook group.

Ron maintained he did nothing wrong. He said online dating is superficial; we judge people by their photos, therefore he was right to comment on her looks. He thought he was going on a date with a bikini model. "Even on the date she'd mentioned how she had come first in an open bikini comp - only two, max three, years ago she was a stunning bikini girl," he said.

In the messages to her he wrote: "I was attracted to the girl in the photos ... I got a girl that looks entirely different ... You're welcome to remains friends with me."

She replied: "This has left me feeling really shit."

A brutal thing for Ron to say, and perhaps an example of how we remain fearless in the walled gardens of social media, despite knowing that anything can be recorded, posted, shared outside. At the edges of every message is potential exposure by screenshot. By a surreal combination of bad luck and his own questionable judgement, the roving attention of one particularly gnarly Facebook group fixed on Ron, and his face flashed up on the screens of thousands of women he had never met.

Share Facebook

Twitter

Mail

Whatsapp Bad Girls Advice comments.

Share Facebook

Twitter

Mail

Whatsapp Bad Girls Advice comments.

He keeps these screenshots on hand; a few dozen pages that he reckons are only a snippet of the total. Added to these are the Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat messages - the details of these accounts had been posted in the comments thread, and members were encouraged to message him. All up, there were hundreds of messages and comments.

It was awful, he said now, stirring a cafe hot chocolate IRL.

Something like this had never happened to Ron, but last year his friend Chris had put a Tinder screenshot on Facebook. It was a profile that had a Drake lyric, "The type of girl that will suck you dry and then eat some lunch with you." A man named Zane started making some lewd comments on the post, the girl's friends hit back, and things escalated. Pretty soon Zane was making rape threats, and months later he would plead guilty to harassment. It was a landmark case, showing that laws about making rape threats could be applied to conversations on Facebook and possibly other platforms.

"I think it was taken out of context," Ron said about Chris and Zane.

"One person wrote something silly in their profile and another wrote silly remarks about that. It was blown out or proportion."

"The female had a friend and that friend was a feminist and had a strong support group behind them. The girl I took out on a date had a strong online support group behind her."

The search for Bad Girls Advice

When the messages began arriving, it crossed Ron's mind that, two days ago he had gone on a date, and the girl had mentioned a girls-only private Facebook group. Then a friend messaged him; a screenshot of the original rant. She was a member of the group called Bad Girls Advice - Ron searched Facebook but it did not come up. You had to be invited to join. You had to be a woman.

Ron was working long shifts and not sleeping well, and it was strange to know he was being called a "balding beer bellied mute little c***" and to be powerless to join the conversation. He messaged Facebook but they did not help. He messaged a page admin. Some heated messages went back and forth. Word got around BGA "a snitch has gone back and told him about the post".

BGA has 10 rules pinned at the top of the page, including no boys, no extreme bullying, no "basic bitches" or "vanilla princesses" (i.e. no cat selfies or prudishness), no underage girls, no underage nudity, no asking for medical advice, and "No F**king Screenshots".

At the time of the Ron-post in early October, the group had about 50,000 members. One month later it has about 80,000 members. This makes it probably the largest all-girl private Facebook group in Australia. It was started in August, about the same time as the Blokes Advice group was shut down after a petition of 15,000 signatures. The group of 200,000 men that had grown pretty raucous and obscene - reportedly there were posts joking about raping women, punching women, and some members were giving out women's contact details and urging their fellow blokes to send them abusive messages.

The shutdown of Blokes Advice saw the whole male banter/merry misogyny scene splinter into smaller groups, and the largest of these now has about 40,000 members. Ron joined this group, which is called B.A., after he learned about BGA. Maybe he wanted his own "strong online support group", but turned out B.A. was allied with BGA.

B.A and BGA have rules against posting screenshots with faces and names visible but these seem to slip through all the time. Here are posts from one hour of a random weeknight:

1 x selfie taken by a guy with dick covered in shaving cream.

1 x photo of penis for a thread about "funny foreskin mishap stories".

1 x screenshot of online dating match asking 'You want some fat cock'.

1 x full on gallery of dick pics.

There are also a lot of posts that are simply supportive, that aren't mean or trying to expose someone, and it could be argued this is why the group was started. You could say the admins do their best to enforce the rules, but the odd dick pic will always slip through, there are just too many members, and too many dick pics in circulation. Some of these dick pics have faces, some of them have names, and some of them even have phone numbers.

The group also sells shirts at $40 inc. postage.

You could argue these things, but then you hear from Denise (not her real name) who was the "snitch" that sent Ron the original screenshot. After the page admins figured out it was her, they set up a Facebook group message to sweet talk her into sharing her ID. When she declined, they suddenly turned and called her a bitch and a c***, and joked about f***ing her grandfather. She had never spoken to them before. They kicked her and her sister out of the group.

For a Facebook group that defends its own privacy so fiercely, Bad Girls Advice doesn't seem to care about anyone else's. You could argue that the act of exposure, of breaching the implicit privacy of a conversation, is the thing that gives BGA its edge, is why you sign up.

"A lot of it was naked pictures girls had received from guys and reposted," Denise said about the page. "They had put in phone numbers suggesting people should contact people."

"There were hundreds of comments on each one and people would say, 'Oh I've sent them a message.' They would all encourage each other to message the person and basically abuse them, harass them, bully them as some sort of payback."

BGA speaks to Hack

Hack contacted a BGA admin about the Ron post, and they said the post was removed as soon as an admin saw it, and the poster was told these types of posts weren't allowed on BGA.

"If they repeat they are blocked from BGA permanently," the admin said.

She said if members break the rules they are removed immediately, but in this case the member didn't break a rule.

She wasn't bullying [Ron]. She was trying to warn other women about not being hurt.

Ron said the post about him had been posted on Monday, he contacted the page on Tuesday, and it wasn't taken down until Thursday. It was up for three to four days.

The admin told Hack BGA was a group where "women can ask and share things that wouldn't be socially acceptable anywhere else. They come to share their confessions, sexual encounters, shocking situations and stories. Dark humour and offensive memes that most people would find distasteful.

"We help a lot of relationships and people feel free and release their inner sexual being they have been hiding."

"We provide entertainment and fun and warn other women about potentially dangerous men and experiences ... We are just trying to have a little community where people can be themselves."

What we've learned from this sad tale

The abuse never spilled outside of social media and Ron is back on there, back on Facebook and Tinder. His own shaming has been superseded by the shaming of other men and women. Ron said he wanted to speak out and take a stand, to stop this happening to others. But online hate is a complex thing, you chop off one head and it grows back as two. His stand seems to be more about a general unease with the way the world has changed; the rise of digital, and the emboldened "feminists".

"When I realised there was this strong following of females, I suspected there were feminists in there having different agendas to maybe the majority of girls in there," he said.

"There's a lot of feminists that take it too far and believe white caucasian males are getting a bad name these days; more than they should be."

The irony of this is the internet is full of men who hate feminism. If we're talking about online lynch mobs, we should talk about popular misogyny, and Gamergate, and that page of men trading photos of Australian schoolgirls, and the 'pick-up artists' who promote rape and domestic violence. It's not hard to believe "strong online support groups" are partly a response to male harassment; pepper spray for the neckbeard; a mob to counter the mob; an eye for an eye.

But that's maybe too grand. Bad Girls Advice does not identify as feminist, and it's allied with Blokes Advice. More than anything, the success of the page speaks to the rise of online hate.

"I'm not one to self harm," Ron said, "but if it happened to other blokes, and I'm sure it has happened, those guys could do harm to themselves because of cyberbullying."

"Whether I'm famous or infamous, I'm not enjoying the spotlight one bit, and I wouldn't like this to happen to any of my mates."