
How Trolls Overran the Public Square - hhs
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trolls-win-control-of-the-public-square-by-j-bradford-delong-2019-12
======
FriedBread
> "There is now a near-consensus – at least among those who are not completely
> steeped in social-media propaganda – that the current public sphere does not
> serve us well."

Anyone who doesn't agree with my conclusion obviously shouldn't be listened to
because they're part of the problem.

I don't know how you can un-ironically say "We need to stop handing off
responsibility for maintaining public space to corporations and algorithms –
and give it back to human beings. We may need to slow down, but we’ve created
democracies out of chaos before. [...]" while arguing for more institutional
gate-keeping. The, mostly, free discourse we have on the internet today is
more democratic than it was prior to the Gutenberg revolution or the rise of
radio. The author just doesn't like the results so they insist we need to go
back to the older simpler way where the aristocracy gets to decide what ideas
are acceptable because they know better than the common man what's good for
him.

~~~
patcon
At risk of losing some people by stating some loose observations and findings
with faux-confidence:

Dense networks of human relations tend to lead to those humans creating
specific network topologies in which liberal values tend to emerge. In places
where the network is sparsed (relative to elsewhere), it is here we find
reduced empathy for distant others, mistrust, populism, higher social distance
between any two random nodes overall, and also bastions of socially
conservative thought.

My growing belief is that most social conservativism is network damage to the
social fabric. But if that sounds slippery, don't worry: there is no need to
purge it, as reducing the average path length in the network will see that
happen on its own. Pluralistic values and greater ability to form consensus
arises in spaces where we re-weave the social fabric into the sorts of
topologies that cities tend to permute through on their own.

Be very skeptical due to my lack of citing sources, but I share the above in
earnest with this comment left in haste <3

EDIT: to be clear, I believe there is also some "illness" in the progressive
left as well, due to their social distance from certain groups as well. The
network is sick. A healed network will be some place in between, at a place we
can all live with :)

~~~
Avicebron
This is a a circular argument and somewhat disingenuous. You presuppose that
liberal values emerge from a "denser network", which at surface level seems
fine. Except definitionally I argue that pluralism itself doesn't work without
defined in groups and out groups (denoting the plurality of the group). This
is inherently "anti-liberal" in the sense that it requires continued in group
and out group hostility to maintain the segmentation.

Looking into history at say, early Iberia, the plurality was maintained by
intense violence between muslim and christian populations living in proximity
to each other. In order to maintain this plurality the in group had to
drastically enforce conformity while in combat with the out group to maintain
topological cohesion.

To diagnose the social problems rising in the country as "network damage" is
almost calling people who disagree with what I imagine is your stance as
mentally ill. That is a dangerous road to move down and I would advise you to
reconsider or at least allow for the nuance that potentially this isn't just
about identifying characteristics of a population feeling threatened by
another group.

But rather this could a manifestation of a very real feeling of insecurity
that is not caused by lets just say it, racial tensions, and perhaps more of
an economic anxiety bent. If Maslow isn't getting his due, then the real
conversation is how can people move to middle ground feel more unified by
shared prosperity.

Othering people based on a diagnosis of "not enough different people they
talked to" adds to the problem instead of addresses it.

Be very skeptical due to my lack of citing sources, but I share the above in
earnest with this comment left in haste <3

EDIT: Clarity

~~~
patcon
Sorry, didn't mean to imply one side as mentally ill. I'll walk it back a bit:
If there's an illness, both poles have responsibility. And maybe only ill in
the sense that they will break the whole together. Due to historic districting
and balance of power in the USA at least, the illness on the right seems to be
"winning" in the political arena there. But it'd be a comparable powderkeg if
the far left got their people in without laying a foundation for consensus-
building. The conservative right doesn't have as much culture of consensus-
building in its DNA imho, so it's hard to look to them for any hope of
resolution to the crisis of social distance.

Bah, sorry, this is like a "drinks in bar" level of uff-the-cuff conversation
on my part. Your reply was wonderful though :)

> Othering people based on a diagnosis of "not enough different people they
> talked to" adds to the problem instead of addresses it.

Fwiw, there's a really rad Santa Fe Institute podcast that addresses that very
thing, which I'm listening to right now. tl;dr - we're all terribly biased but
mostly just about people we DON'T have connection to, while we're
FANTASTICALLY great integrators and estimators of even small nuances in the
social fabrics that we're directly in conversation with.
[https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/9-U7UI7GsP](https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/9-U7UI7GsP)

~~~
Avicebron
Sometimes "drinks in a bar" level conversation can be the most rewarding. Let
me know if you want to get a drink and talk about it.

I'll cede that both poles have responsibility and that the conservative right
have unified themselves mostly on a shared set of identities with little room
for consensus, this is a problem.

But I think we need to remove ourselves from totally binary thinking (he says
as a he programs all the time) and separate some concepts like neo liberal
financial models from liberal social principles as I bet we would agree on the
social and disagree on the financial. I'm assuming a lot so please correct me
where I'm wrong. Reactionary populism is very often correlated to what are
perceived to be unfair economic policy (see "reparation" payments of post
world war 1 germany to france...ended tragically in 1945).

Dismissing the "conservatives" as on unified entity despite their strong
coalition of identity misrepresents the problem as I see it.

~~~
patcon
Don't suppose you're in Toronto? :)

------
hirundo
> social media ... undermined the democratic process ... right into people’s
> ears and hijack their brains ... by swarms of “influencers,” propagandists,
> and bots

"Hijack their brains" is quite a violent metaphor. It's a frame designed to
justify strong countermeasures. But what alternative is there that isn't more
dangerous than the status quo, with the potential to become a Ministry of
Truth?

It's either a free market of brain hijackers or a list of officially approved
brain hijackers, take your pick.

~~~
creato
I think this position is based on thinking that the social media users that
have risen to the top of the influencer pile got there by some organic
reflection of society. I think that's bullshit, and changing that feedback
loop of incentives that exists between social media companies and these users
does not necessarily (or even likely) imply a "ministry of truth".

~~~
patcon
I empathize with the concern. My mindblown moment in fretting over this was a
realization inspired by social physics research and complexity science:

Just enforce a shape of the social fabric instead of worrying about specific
content within that social fabric. Maintain edge quotas, not information
quotas. We have tons of research on what are "healthier" shapes of network
topology than what we've built.

~~~
trophycase
Do you have any additional reading on this? I've always been interested in
these topics of social network topology or systems theory or what have you but
struggle to find good information on it.

~~~
patcon
Yay! Social physics :) There's a great Authors at Google talk by Sandy
Pentland, about his book of the same name. Gives a good overview of the book,
but 100% still worth a read after watching, esp if you are someone who works
with (or would like to work with) large groups of people -- event organizing,
companies, community, group facilitation, etc.

[https://youtu.be/HMBl0ttu-Ow](https://youtu.be/HMBl0ttu-Ow)

------
mikedilger
I don't share the experience of this author. I don't often encounter trolls.
What I encounter instead is intense differences of opinion, difficult to
reconcile, and a lack of respect and manners not because the people at the
keyboards are trolls, but because of the psychology of arguing anonymously
with an unknown and imagined "enemy".

I don't believe "traditional gatekeepers" is a good solution to the intensity
and the chaos.. I think the right solution is just time. Social norms need
time to adjust, on many fronts. We are in a period of upheaval, but as Jimmy
Eat World says "it just takes some time, little girl, you're in the middle of
the ride, everything, everything will be just fine..."

~~~
allovernow
I think part of the problem is that the word troll has been (probably somewhat
deliberately) bastardized to mean "anyone who questions my views."

------
danShumway
> There is now a near-consensus – at least among those who are not completely
> steeped in social-media propaganda – that the current public sphere does not
> serve us well.

I mean, is there? There's near-consensus that the current public sphere has
some significant problems. It doesn't follow that the old sphere was actually
all that great, or that the Internet is a failed experiment. Are there really
people who would seriously advocate that life was _better_ before the
Internet? Did none of these people grow up in a rural area?

While I'll be the first to pile on companies like Facebook and Twitter, and
I'll be the first to say that I don't like the general direction the Internet
is going right now, my goal isn't to regress back into isolated pockets where
fewer people have voices. It's been an interesting experience recently to find
myself regularly needing to defend an idea that I figured was self-evident --
that it's good for people to be able to communicate with each other.

> But as the Internet began to spread to each household and then to each
> smartphone, fears about the danger of an “eternal September” have been
> confirmed.

I'm relatively young, but I'm still old enough to remember some of the more
toxic gatekeeping arguments I heard in Open Source/gaming/general "nerd"
communities, and it's really weird and uncomfortable for me to hear people
today so easily reference the same phrasing as if it was entirely prophetic,
rather than deeply problematic.

------
Khaine
The Public Square was much better served by forums and BBSs that came before
them. Now that corporations have taken over the Public Square, they have
become beholden to those who complain the most. Amazingly, South Park
predicted a lot of this with their Cartoon Wars episode[1] in that bowing to
pressure from one group, means bowing to pressure from all Groups.

Previously the web was thousands of independent forums and sites with their
own rules. They were small enough and diffuse enough that you couldn't bring a
large amount of pressure to force a forum or site to change. Now, everything
is owned by a small number of companies that this is a feasible approach to
silencing opponents.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartoon_Wars_Part_I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartoon_Wars_Part_I)

------
larnmar
Speaking of eternal September, I feel like some of the latecomers need to be
educated on the actual meaning of “troll” (eg this writer, and most
journalists).

A troll is someone who posts deliberately provocative content for the purposes
of deriving shits and giggles from the outraged responses of others.

A propagandist is not a troll. A paid shill is not a troll. A person who
sincerely holds views which you dislike is not a troll. Only a troll is a
troll.

This being so, I’m not convinced that trolls are a significant issue at this
point, although partially it’s getting harder to tell due to Poe’s Law.

~~~
CPLX
The problem is the two concepts are symbiotic.

You start out a conspiracy with trolling and people doing it for the lulz and
the reactions, and eventually you end up drawing in the unstable and mentally
ill as true believers.

Which can lead to unpleasant outcomes, like pizzagate or Qanon.

~~~
henrikschroder
One thing all the conspiracy nut circles have in common, is that it's _always_
YouTube videos that they use to try to convince the non-believers of their
preferred kind of crazy.

So I wonder what role YouTube monetization plays in this. How much money can
you make grifting the gullible off of YouTube ads? As for q-anon, there's
plenty of characters straight up selling merchandise, which should clue you in
to what kind of operation it actually is.

It wasn't that long ago that YouTube decided to de-monetize all antivaxx
videos. Has that had a noticeable outcome? If amoral grifters can't make money
peddling bullshit ideas, do they do it less? Are there fewer antivaxx videos
being made today, than a year ago? Are fewer people being sucked into that
particular conspiracy bullshit today, than a year ago?

~~~
chrisco255
How much do the major news networks make overhyping and overplaying headlines
that take things completely out of context, like the oceans running out of
oxygen or some other bullshit? How many decades did we hear cholesterol and
fat were bad for us before that was flat out debunked? You act like there are
good guys and bad guys here and not 5000 shades of grey and that it's easy or
desirable for Google to be an arbiter of truth.

~~~
andrepd
>cholesterol and fat were bad for us [...] was flat out debunked

That's a new one. Besides, isn't this how science is supposed to work?
Improving accuracy, discarding what doesn't work?

~~~
chrisco255
The point is that consensus was one thing for decades and then it was later
overturned. But if "the platform" backs the consensus then you don't get
opinions that challenge status quo in the first place. I don't want to live in
a society like that. Might as well be in China.

------
ggm
Editing (as in, have an editorial, and remove content or submitters you don't
want) and shadow-banning (which isn't entirely the same. Its social
engineering)

Anonymity drives this too. But, some people need pseudonomous status to feel
safe. Does this include making trolls feel safe?

What else is there other than pay-to-participate?

I have participated in NZ "nethui" where the different sides of editorial
policy, and anonymity come up.

Why people troll is a good question. Some people are deeply unhappy and have
arrived at a place where they feel good by making acts of depression happen in
other people. "Why should you be happy if I cannot"

The hate-language and violence towards minorities, women, gays and trans is
especially evil. We now have a world where its ok to _write_ things, which in
times past were clearly encitement to violence. _This last paragraph will
possibly attract attack on the specious grounds its anti-men. This is
symptomatic of the problem._

------
pokoleo
If you're interested, the Revolt of the Public is a similar thread:

[https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-
Millen...](https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-
Millennium/dp/1732265143)

------
haydn3
It's just a matter of what people are interested in, and having an attitude
that clearly shows you're not interested in that topic, will draw everyone
who's not interested in that topic to follow you. That's why trolling is so
popular.

------
bjt2n3904
We responded to them. That's how.

Flat earthers were never taken seriously. A bunch of kooks. Then the History
channel "documentaries" hit, interviewing the flat earthers and giving them
air time. Facebook crusaders constantly posted memes making fun of flat
earthers, and "disproving" them a la XKCD #386 [1]

Counter-intuitively, their numbers grew. Just goes to show that no exposure is
bad exposure.

The old solution was the best: do not feed the trolls.

[1] - [https://xkcd.com/386/](https://xkcd.com/386/)

------
scarejunba
Seems like a problem that other people have. My Twitter feed is great, my
Instagram feed is a source of happiness, and I go on Facebook to find fun
events my friends are going to.

Listen, you know the old saying about smelling shit everywhere you go.

~~~
notacoward
I kind of agree, and kind of not. I've said many times that your
Twitter/Facebook feeds are mostly what you make of them, and that curating
those feeds is an essential skill. I also very deliberately curate my Facebook
feed to bring me joy instead of anger, though my Twitter feed is a bit more
like Fight Club.

On the other hand, curation is a skill. Many struggle with it even under
relatively benign circumstances, let alone when dedicated and well-funded
adversaries are deliberately infiltrating and abusing otherwise-positive
conversations. By "adversaries" I mean not just political propagandists but
also corporate ones BTW. Thus I'm a bit hesitant to suggest "just curate your
feed better" as a complete solution. People need help. That help might combine
education, structural change, and APIs (e.g. to support opt-in shared
filtering and block lists). Probably all three.

