How Trolls Overran the Public Square | Hacker News Reader

How Trolls Overran the Public Square

project-syndicate.org

62 pointshhs61 comments

> "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.

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 :)

This seems mostly like handwaved logic though, why don't you consider liberalism a form of populism for example? After all, the political values you're describing arise by your own admission in areas of high density. How can something be populist and yet also targeted towards a population that you've defined as being the more minor or otherwise less dense? Not that it'd be correct either, but I could take the same elements you've used and describe Liberalism as xenophobic towards anything that doesn't share its values. I really am trying to see how you arrived at the point you did but it mostly just seems like you decided one side was wrong first and developed your explanation afterwards.

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

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

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.

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

>My growing belief is that most social conservativism is network damage to the social fabric.

I could make the exact same argument (also without sources, since I'm lazy tonight) but in the inverse, that most social liberalism is caused by network damage to the social fabric - and I bet I could make a much more compelling argument, given that the contemporary brand of social liberalism (i.e. social Progressivism) sees breaking down traditional social fabrics as an axiomatic good.

>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.

This only happens when the topologies are not organic, but artificial. And to top it all off these new topologies still require elite support to supplant the organic ones. The only reason a place like San Francisco still draws people (to the extent that it actually does; I keep seeing stories here and elsewhere about people quitting that place in droves) is because of an Elite network that is seriously incentivized to squeeze out every last benefit they can from their existing network effects before it crashes and burns.

I'd tend to agree. Ironically "othering" is one of the strongest social binders there is, see: religion, nationalism, etc.

This isn't really "othering", though. It's similar to a two-sided-market, where the Elites sit as the middle-platform and transmit value between the existing state or corporate institutions and the, well, not-elite. And then this latter group transmits value back via an extraction mechanism employed by this Elite.

>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, mistrust, populism, increased social distance between any two random nodes, and also bastions of socially conservative thought.

Indeed. People in large cities hardly talk to one another outside of ordering coffee. People in Appalachia talk to each other constantly. Is it any wonder that the sparse social networks of densely populated areas result in reduced empathy, mistrust, populism, increased social distance between any two random nodes and also bastions of socially conservative thought.

SF still sounds like it did in the 70s. You'd think a place could have gotten some new ideas since Computer Lib/Dream Machines was published there.

EDIT2: acknowledging my shitty tone and that I deserve downvotes. I'll try harder next time not to fall into the trap of shallowly divisive statements

More critique to add on to the article (attaching to the thread since I like to similar topics grouped together for discourse reasons):

One of the author's key points is that the economics of networks is the reason for poor discourse. Money & influence are identified as the drivers of bad behavior.

But this has only inspired the author to write the very hand-wavy outrage media piece that is in the exact same nature as the media that they are condemning. No real solutions, no real framing of the problem in a way that can be solved. In short, the article is created by the exact system the article complains about.

If you think that the economic incentives of discourse is broken, there's real "journalistic" work to do. Propose an economic model of "value creation". Show, through modeling, how easy it is for bad behavior to dominate with the given market conditions. Isolate and propose policies that would change behavior. Model out what should happen if those changes were to take place. And then call for a real world test to see if that really happens.

I'm reminded of Feynman's experience in the arts discussing "The ethics of inequality in the fragmentation of knowledge."

He eventually extracted from the Jesuit priest that "fragmentation" merely meant that the Catholic Church didn't control knowledge like they had in the 13th century.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/search?page=26&q=Richard+Fe...

Well said..

Unfortunately, i think few espouse such beliefs or ideas.

Further, it's far easier and more seductive to ensure that opinions one doesn't like can be censored or shamed into silence rather than win with better ideas.

But what about the public forum run by profit driven private entities!

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

It's actually kind of ironic that the OP indulges in such blatant well-poisoning, when that's exactly the kind of fallacious argument that ruins public discourse.

On the broader issue, while I don't agree with gatekeeping, I do think it's important to educate people about when social media is at its best and when it's at its worst. Among relatively small groups of people who already have a fairly strong connection - e.g. families, clubs, hobbies - but can't readily get together in person, social media can do a lot of good. Corporate accounts, or accounts with a million effectively anonymous followers? Generally garbage. Note that these distinctions are easily made based on structure, not content. Without getting into the issue of who should do what about these less beneficial structures, I think we'd be better off without them.

> 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.

Is this true I wonder? Sure anybody can post, but we aren't all heard equally, at least not along standard social media channels where upvotes and algorithms determine who hears your voice - and these tools can be gamed (to what degree? I don't know)

A world where anybody can speak but only the powerful can be heard isn't much different from the world where only the powerful can speak.

To that end, I wonder if a systematic study could be done to see just how equal social media really is.

Are we seeing a redistribution of the power of speech/press back to the people, or simply a shift of power to those who know how (and have the funding) to control it?

This is an equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome issue.

Part of competing in the current marketplace of ideas isn't just the quality of your idea it's your ability to market it. Whether you particularly like that aspect of our public discourse is irrelevant to the current state. The difference here is that the toolkit of getting your message amplified has a much lower bar to entry now than it did before (a nobody with a good tweet can get their video or soundcloud profile in front of millions of eyes). It's probably the case that we're just seeing a shift in the mix of actors who hold power, but the trend has been towards it being easier for people to enter the fight.

My assumption is that the easier it is for people to participate the more we'll trend towards a steady state where the quality of your ideas and your ability to sell them will be the deciding factor in your reach. As opposed to having a dominant advantage because your [race | social caste | profession | political party] has captured the medium of communication and intellectual production. Unfortunately I think we're seeing those groups (2,3, and 4 primarily) lashing out and trying to maintain their advantage to the general detriment of society.

> My assumption is that the easier it is for people to participate the more we'll trend towards a steady state where the quality of your ideas and your ability to sell them will be the deciding factor in your reach. As opposed to having a dominant advantage because your [race | social caste | profession | political party] has captured the medium of communication and intellectual production. Unfortunately I think we're seeing those groups (2,3, and 4 primarily) lashing out and trying to maintain their advantage to the general detriment of society.

I agree with the last part of this but maybe not the first. I think it's pretty presumptive that just because anybody can put content out there that there will be anything close to an even playing field. Only time will tell.

For an early internet example: the distributed nature of the internet meant that in theory anybody could create and publish their own platform. Anyone with good ideas should easily be able to buy a domain and enter the web marketplace.

In the modern world, only a few websites dominate the vast majority of eyeballs. This isn't how it has to be, but this is how reality has played out. If you want a platform with users you need at minimum to treat it like a part time job, and possibly a few million in venture capital to boot.

Or, to put it another way, centralization was a more powerful force than quality in choice of platform. I argue this may happen to some degree with content itself (or likely already does. Look at top YouTube channels and decide for yourself.)

There's no doubting that modern internet and modern discourse is in theory open, but I find a lot of doubt that it's open in practice. I can't help but read an upvoted link on Reddit and wonder if there's an upvote farm behind it or social marketing firm carefully crafting it, as opposed to an individuals voice.

Some platforms have even higher barriers to entry, like YouTube or twitch.tv, good luck getting more than 10 views as an individual there unless you make it atleast a part time job. But I'm sure a well funded source can make a video that looks like a small time content creator but pushes their view or their product.

> 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.

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".

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.

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.

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

Changing incentives to manipulate social discourse is pretty much the definition of a ministry of truth. If the idea is that commercialism is bad at setting goalposts then surely a simpler solution would be a government run ad-free social media company moderated by constitutional restrictions on speech and nothing else.

Do you consider the presence or absence of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to be "ministry of truth"?

Would you consider regulations about how precisely targeted ads may be to be "ministry of truth"?

There are a lot of ways in which the behavior of this industry could be shaped (and already has been shaped) that are not obviously manipulating social discourse in the way that "ministry of truth" implies.

I suppose if you abstract a problem enough then any action is comparable to another, I can't say I see the usefulness it provides for answering rhetorical questions though.

There's already a list of 'officially approved' brain hijackers. They're just powered either by state agencies, bots or incredibly powerful corporations. There really is no free market at play because the entire thing is dark patterns all the way down designed to maximize engagement.

The whole thing seems to be a narrative designed to deny the sincerity of anyone who disagrees with you.

If someone has a different opinion to you, then clearly they’re a troll. Or maybe a bot, or a shill, or a paid Russian propagandist influencer. And if they’re none of these things then clearly they’re the victim of one of the above, hijacking their mind.

What they’re definitely not is a real individual who sincerely believes their opinions and has arrived at them by the same process as you have.

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..."

Social norms work because there is self-regulation. But how does self-regulation work if there are no aligned incentives?

Why would trolls living thousands of miles away give a hoot about your precious democracy? They don’t stand to gain anything by following some “social norms”. In fact, you can profit quite well writing drivel to engage the communal lizard brain of a population, liberally peppering your content with advertisements.

So while yes I do think that we are in the middle of rapid upheaval, things will get much worse before it gets better. I wonder if the solution will look like Stevenson’s idea of “stream editors” - AI or even humans who sort through the constant noise to filter only the information deemed trustworthy or relevant. Then we have gatekeepers once again.

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

Similar to what you said, I often see people arguing against strawmen, or even arguing strawman on strawman. To the point where internet discourse is a simulacrum of real life politics.

> 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.

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

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.

True but then that writer would have a much smaller ax to grind...

Agreed, I’ve noticed a trend where people call anyone who publicly expresses a view that they disagree with a “troll”.

Heretic is so passe.

The proper term is "flamer". Political Twitter is mostly flamers, not trolls.

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.

Once the trolls realized that they could convince enough people to join or believe them to impact the real world it was over for internet freedom. The people that have held power for generations don't like losing that power. It's a shame that we'll lose most of the good parts of the internet along with it too, and all we'll be left with is a platform for entertainment of the most clicks. The internet can't route around broken culture.

> The internet can't route around broken culture.

That explains quite a bit. So many of us thought that the internet was going to change society for the better. Instead, society changed the internet for the worse.

Utopian visions always have the problem of dealing with the humans that we have, not the humans that we wish we had.

Humanity has and will continue to be the downfall of many a grand vision.

The internet simply became a better mirror. It becomes more human every day. This is what humanity actually looks like on a larger scale.

Now that we can see ourselves at a scale we've never been able, we have an opportunity to make adjustments at scale, which is a process that takes generations.

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?

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.

>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?

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.

It goes the other way too, with state-sponsored groups using troll tactics and even enlisting "for the lulz" trolls to disrupt conversations that don't suit them.

Also, while it's true that "troll" gets used too lightly sometimes, it's also true that a high percentage of those who like to point it out just don't want to examine their own genuinely troll-ish behavior. Examples of "telling hard truths" and "consider all sides" and "devil's advocate" abound here.

> "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."

It's orthogonal to all of those. Not all propagandists are trolls, but some certainly are.

I think people started using the term as a cheap dismissal before it recently morphed into such a catch all for "anyone who disagrees with me."

Incedentally, there's a weird sort of paradox in the nature of online communication. On one hand, you have a medium where information spreads instantaneously and one could expect, given that we are all exposed to effectively the same global platform, that language might homogenize and evolve more slowly. On the other hand, it's interesting to see how internet lingo tends to shift in meaning seemingly even more quickly than IRL language. There's some deeper conclusion here somewhere regarding the nature of human language but I'm having trouble conceptualizing it.

J. Bradford DeLong is hardly a latecomer. He has been around longer than most of those reading this, quite likely including you. You might feel he needs to be corrected, but "educated" is an attempt to claim relative authority that might not be deserved (even if it's relevant).

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.

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

https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-Millen...

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.

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/

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com