Trolls, social media and extreme politics
Every
one thought trolls were harmless. Maybe it’s in the nickname. Half way between
a garden gnome and a creature in Lord of the Rings. Comment threads and social
media feeds were their lairs. Spaces to vent anger, racism, sexism, terrorism.
Where any extreme view and violent fantasy could run rampant. No one was policing trolls comments. Like plucking grey hairs, if someone did slam one
account down, three more would grow in its place. The anonymity of the Internet
revealed humanity’s hidden frustration and foulness.
Rather
than view the troll as a real valid thinking individual, we dehumanised them. We
could imagine the troll as a spotty teenager who couldn't get laid or an angry
office worker taking their anger and boredom and lack of autonomy out on the
screen. Yet in the wake of Brexit and the election of Trump, trolls don't look
harmless anymore. Social media may not be the cause of extremist thinking but
it has fed it. Negativity has flourished first on blogs and then disseminated
via news feeds on Facebook and Twitter.
Trump
is President of the Trolls. His political speeches became an extension of his
Twitter feed. Unedited. Unrepressed. Short, fast, retweetable, immediate
thoughts shared with the public in seconds. Out of his mind and onto the
screen. Would Trump have become president if his fans didn't feel he
represented the every man? He was just like us, wasn't he? He even tweeted at 4
in the morning when he couldn't sleep, like the rest of us.
I first noticed the relationship between social media and
extreme political views it in August 2014. My Facebook news feed was filled
with a wave of hatred and anti-Semitism in the wake of the Israeli invasion
into Palestine. It started with some comparisons to the Holocaust. The next
thing liberal open minded people - artists, fashion stylists, photographers,
musicians who were my acquaintances and friends - were posting strange blog
posts with increasingly violent content. I saw images of Jews being lynched. I
saw people quoting 1930s fascist speeches. I was so upset by the content hitting
me like an algorithmic wave, I couldn't sleep. I decided to get off Facebook
and deleted 1500 ‘friends’.
Yet I stayed on Twitter. I grew to love Instagram. I slowly
began to dabble with Facebook again. I was choosy with who I followed. Whose
feed I wanted to glimpse. I increasingly created a bubble of my own interests -
an echo of my view of the world. After Brexit I realised I was not the only
person to create a buffer of like-minded virtual souls around me. What became
clear is people with opposing views - the slight majority - were also doing the
same thing. We were all living in an echo chamber of our own politics. There
was none of the even-handed political detachment that journalism and the law
was said to uphold. Newspapers increasingly began to echo the extreme anger of
the troll. Headlines (largely from Rupert Murdoch’s empire) were written in troll
speak. The world became binary - us versus them, good versus bad, right versus
wrong. The whole concept of a referendum was made for this atmosphere. There
was no nuance. We lived in world where there was only a yes or no without any
discussion of the in between. ‘You’re wrong and here’s a death threat to go
with it.’
In contrast, a wave of petitions became to emerge online -
a social media version of good fairies. I signed numerous online petitions -
against war, protect the NHS, stop Monsanto, save the bees. I would receive
passionate emails from 38 degrees and Change.org. They felt like positive ways to
have a little say and reminded me of the Amnesty International letters I would
copy and sign and send off as a teenager to save someone lingering in a
foreign jail. I imagined children who wanted to change the world presenting
these heart felt petitions on the steps of Downing Street. Yet nothing seemed
to quite come from these notes sent into the ether. No serious political
change. When over 4 million people signed a petition for a second Brexit
referendum, people were calmly sent a transcription of the discussion between
20 people in a closed doors meeting in a back room ignoring the request. If 4
million digital signatures have no effect, that online click form of resistance
isn’t working.
Meanwhile, social media companies have said nothing. In
fact, it was in their favour to keep quiet. They want our shock, our outrage.
They want us to post lists from Buzzfeed and blog responses to media stories. These
all increase advertising revenue. Youths in Macedonia began to create fake
pro-Trump websites in order to entice Facebook thread clicks which earned them
pocket money. As Adam Curtis recently in an interview with the Evening
Standard. “The fact is that angry people click more and clicks are gold dust,
clicks are the measure of success for all corporations and media platforms. So
the more angry you get, the more you actually keep everything stable. Your
anger fuels those systems.”
So where does that leave us and what can we do? Leap off of
social media like lemmings of a cliff? In ‘Fuck Off, Google’, a chapter in the
The Invisible Committee’s last book ‘To Our Friends’ they present an
alternative. “Understanding how the
devices around us work, brings an immediate increase in power, giving us a
purchase on what will then no longer appear as an environment, but as a world
arranged in a certain way and one that we can shape. This is the hacker’s
perspective on the world.” We have to shape and change and take control of the
virtual structures of the internet. We need to pull ourselves away from private
companies with strong financial stakes. We need to create a brave new virtual
world.
(c) Francesca Gavin 2016
