I Met the Mother of My Child Trolling VICE's Facebook Comments

This post is part of VICE's 15th anniversary series, presented by VANS

If you're a longtime reader of VICE, you might recognise the name Bin Skinor. Not from our website, or our magazine, but from the comments on our Facebook page – Bin's favourite place to hang out. There, he would do his best to rile people up – often very successfully – by being a contrarian, or saying something outrageous, or just taking the piss out of a particularly thin-skinned commenter. He became kind of notorious among that admittedly niche community for his near-daily trolling, and then, one day, disappeared into thin air.

Because it's VICE UK's 15th birthday this week, we sat down to talk about editorial ideas a few weeks ago, and Bin's name came up. Someone said they'd read a comment from him where he claimed to have met his partner – the mother of his child – in the VICE Facebook comments. I wanted to know if this was true, so tracked him down online, found out, to no one's surprise, that his name isn't really Bin (it's Ben) and gave him and his partner, Sophia, a call.

VICE: So your relationship all started in the VICE Facebook comments.
Sophia: Yeah, I’d noticed this Bin Skinor guy was commenting an awful lot, and thought, 'He doesn’t mind being a bit controversial – he’s this troll-type person.' I would comment on the same article sometimes, and on one about Justin Bieber getting arrested we were both saying, "I think he’s alright, actually."
Ben: Yeah: "That’s made me like Justin Bieber."

It humanised him.
Sophia: Yeah, exactly. We didn’t really talk much after that, until the Bill Cosby sexual assault allegations. Everyone was getting all down on old Bill, and Ben said, "Why would you believe a big successful guy like Bill Cosby would do something like this?" And I disagreed with him. I said something like, "You usually make sense, but this time I’m actually going to disagree with you." And that was it – you were completely smitten.

That was the moment, Ben?
Ben: No, that was when she said she worked in a sex shop [laughs]. No – what did it for me was I liked her; she looked nice and she had some funny things to say.
Sophia: Looked nice and had bants.
Ben: Yeah. So I Facebook-stalked her a tiny bit.
Sophia: A lot.
Ben: A lot. And in her pictures there was a photo of Bhagavad-Gītā, the main Hare Krishna book, which I’ve been into for quite a while, so I was like, 'That’s it – she's the one for me.' I friend requested her, and it's history from then on.

Were you local to each other?
Sophia: No, I was in Bangor in North Wales, Ben was in Leeds. But we just got chatting on Facebook and realised we had a lot in common.
Ben: Yeah, we’re both quite subversive politically – we both don’t like money, and all that kind of stuff.
Sophia: We kind of see the world in the same way. We love complaining about things.

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And what was your first date?
Sophia: It was the 26th of February, 2015. I knew my family would think I was crazy for going off to Leeds to meet some random guy off the internet, so I said I was going to visit a friend. I told a mate where I was going – [Ben] might have been a murdering psychopath for all I knew.
Ben: Yeah, and your friend made me send her a picture of my bank statement so she knew where I lived.
Sophia: And you thought I was a cop!
Ben: I thought she was an undercover cop, sent via VICE to take me away for inciting— well, all sorts of things. I was smoking a lot of weed at the time.
Sophia: I remember asking him, "Where are you from?" and that sort of thing, and he wouldn’t tell me, because at this point he thought I was an undercover cop.
Ben: I was like, 'This is going way too smoothly, something's not right.'
Sophia: You had this idea you were going to take me to this nice place in Leeds, and when we got there it was shut. Also, bizarrely enough, the second time we tried to go to that restaurant someone was pelting us with dried muffins as we were trying to get there.

Sounds like a good bonding experience.
Ben: It was, yeah. The first weekend we spent together, you came to Leeds, we got really stoned and then went to bed.
Sophia: Yeah, we went back and I spoke too much; it kind of blew your mind how much I was talking.
Ben: She nearly made me whitey. She put me in pre-whitey. But by that point we were speaking pretty much all day, every day, so it was only going to go one way, really.

Ben, you were doing a lot of trolling of the VICE comments at the time – what was your motivation there?
Ben: My motivation was: I used to be a recruitment consultant. When I started it was out of necessity, because I had a big coke habit and I needed a lot of money, and I just kind of enjoyed it and was really ruthless. But the more years that went by I got less ruthless, I got rid of my coke habit – I had a daughter, which mellowed me out – so I really didn’t need the money. But it meant I was in an office for eight hours a day with these recruitment bell ends. I could kind of do the job with my eyes shut, but I hated it, so as soon as I got into work, I’d open VICE up and try to get into arguments and stuff.

What was your strategy? What was the easiest way to provoke somebody?
Sophia: You just seemed to take the opposite view to what everybody said, whether you believed it or not. That whole Bill Cosby thing – you didn’t really believe he was this good, stand-up guy.
Ben: I did! I grew up with The Cosby Show – I couldn’t believe that Dr Huxtable would do such a terrible thing. But I know the error of my ways now. But I didn’t just used to take the opposite stance; I’d choose my articles quite carefully and pick quite an extreme stance.

What did you think of the actual VICE content? I can't remember any of the specific comments, but I do remember them being largely negative.
Ben: I really liked it! I don’t know if I’ve changed a lot or if VICE has changed a lot over the past few years, but I’m not really that into it any more. I still do look at it, but there are no [below the line] comments now. That's a good thing, but I stopped commenting before the comments disappeared. I hadn’t commented for almost a year.

So your trolling days are behind you.
Ben: Totally, yeah.
Sophia: A little bit.
Ben: A little bit. I just troll her in person now. I like an argument.
Sophia: He does.

Fair enough – it’s stimulating stuff.
Ben: Yeah. I used to really love winding people up on VICE. But I also had a genuine, genuine political agenda, which is that society should be run by people who are 20 to 30 years old. I was already older than that when I was doing all this trolling, so I kind of felt like I was past it, but I was trying to instil a bit of hatred for the police in youngsters. I thought it was my civic duty to encourage, basically, children to go out and smash things.
Sophia: And he still does [laughs].
Ben: Yeah, I still believe that completely, but I’m now doing it through Krishna consciousness, which is far more subversive.

That was going to be my last question – you told me on Facebook that you're both into Krishna consciousness, and that the two of you now have a baby?
Ben: Yeah, he’s nearly two – he’s called Avi. And obviously we’ve got Lulu – who’s my daughter from a previous relationship – who lives with us full time as well, so we’re a proper little family.
Sophia: Yeah.

Congratulations. So Bin Skinor really is no more.
Sophia: Yeah, you deleted your account, not even just deactivated it. There was a 4chan thing that people set up about him, though.
Ben: Yeah, there was all sorts.
Sophia: Yeah, saying, "Who is this dickhead?" I loved that when you showed me. I thought it was amazing.

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