The earliest internet maxim needs an update.
The advice has long endured: “don’t feed the trolls.” Which is, essentially, don’t attempt to reason with someone immune to reason.
- This made sense for Web 1.0 when everything was new and anonymous. That’s when we learned not to even read the comments section.
- It made just as much sense in Web 2.0: the social media era. We learned that some people only serve to degrade conversation.
It doesn’t work now.
When the United States elected a man whose best skill was trolling, it stopped working.
Why?
Because, in a democratized internet, when the stranger on the other side of the screen has the same power as you, you really can ignore them.
The classic vision of the troll was a middle-aged man living in his parent’s basement, not the most powerful man in the world.
When a troll has no power in the real world, our response of ignoring them most often works. Because there is nothing the troll can do to make themselves be heard.
When the U.S. President and the world’s richest man are trolls, they quite literally can’t be ignored! They can raise a retaliatory army of followers. News outlets have to cover them. Their words and actions define public policy!
It’s time to update “don’t feed the trolls.”
Removing trolls from platforms has been remarkably effective. They can’t be eliminated, but ignoring them doesn’t do that, either. It has done the much better job of drastically reducing the impact of the most powerful.
It also means we have to affirmatively deal with trolling as a behavior. Ignoring trolls works on the individual basis when there are few of them. But it does little when trolling becomes a normalized communication strategy used by many people and by the powerful.
Content moderation has done wonders for social media. Even as it is unpopular with some and loathed by some others. It is imperfect, but will eventually help define the accepted rules of the game.
I’d rather not outsource all of that work to an algorithm.
Updating “Don’t feed the trolls” means
- Learning about trolling,
- Figuring out what the troll is trying to do,
- Keeping the focus on the main subject, and
- Rejecting the idea that the person is making a simple argument.
Trolls are fed by attention. But if we can’t ignore them, we must reject the trolling behavior itself.
And it takes an entire internet culture to stop feeding them.