Perspective: Truth decayThe Trolls Are Everywhere. Now What Are We Supposed to Do?

Published 11 November 2019

Forget the decline of gatekeepers. Imagine a world bereft of gates and uncrossable lines, with no discernible rules. Andrew Marantz’s just published book, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation, offers a detailed and disturbing study of how the social media platforms, rolled out over the last decade by a group of nerdy but naïve Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, have been hijacked by “edge lords” — another name for a collection of nihilists, right-wing nationalists, conspiracy purveyors, white supremacists, and more, whose goal is to downgrade the discourse in a way that would soon corrode the entire system. “The ranking algorithms on social media laid out clear incentives: provoke as many activating emotions as possible; lie, spin, dog-whistle; drop red pill after red pill; step up to the line repeatedly, in creative new ways,” Marantz writes. Public discourse is being replaced by the dance of discord and enragement and noxiousness.

Forget the decline of gatekeepers. Imagine a world bereft of gates and uncrossable lines, with no discernible rules. Kara Swisher, editor at large for the technology news website Recode, writes in the New York Times that that’s the Hadean landscape that has been painted expertly, in dark hues, by Andrew Marantz in his book, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.

Hijacking, as Marantz ends up concluding his detailed, and disturbing study of the modern internet, “is a mild term for what has gone on ever since a group of innovative tech entrepreneurs started rolling out social media over the last decade,” Swisher writes.

As in the famous novella by Voltaire, that nerdy passel of Candides had not thought through the impact and consequences of their choices. As a result, they ended up creating what might be called The Purge — and it’s happening around the world, 365 days a year, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Consider the Reddit founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, who started their online community forum with the slogan “Freedom from the press” and a firm ethos of unfiltered speech. “We built Reddit around the principle of ‘No editors. The people are the editors,’” Huffman told Marantz.

Unfortunately, Huffman and Ohanian never specified which kind of people they hoped to attract — and they certainly did not expect the quick arrival of armies of what Marantz calls “gate crashers.” The goal of these “edge lords” — another name for a collection of nihilists, right-wing nationalists, conspiracy purveyors, white supremacists and more — was to downgrade the discourse in a way that would soon corrode the entire system.

So the geeks built a chaos machine that ginned up a world of socially acceptable sadism, and Marantz dived into the toxic stew to chronicle the scene. And what a Thunderdome it is, with players ranging from the digital equivalent of carnival barkers to — perhaps even scarier — true believers.

Swisher adds:

All this is what Marantz calls “American Berserk,” and the damage has been severe on a worldwide scale. Marantz is right to worry. As I have written in my Opinion columns for this newspaper, I have seen firsthand how social media sites amplify villainous voices and weaponize them, too — and it’s not clear they can be controlled. The optimism of social media’s creators has been overshadowed by the cynicism of the vicious propaganda spewed on their platforms.

In a recent column for The Times, titled “Free Speech Is Killing Us,” Marantz sounded the alarm. “Having spent the past few years embedding as a reporter with the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical memes into national policy, I no longer have any doubt that the brutality that germinates on the internet can leap into the world of flesh and blood,” he wrote. “The question is where this leaves us. Noxious speech is causing tangible harm. Yet this fact implies a question so uncomfortable that many of us go to great lengths to avoid asking it. Namely, what should we — the government, private companies or individual citizens — be doing about it?”

Unfortunately, Swisher writes, Marantz has no real answers, except that all things eventually fall apart.

Perhaps the jig is up, as the big platforms and the regulators who worry about what they have wrought begin to crack down on the system they’ve established. “The ranking algorithms on social media laid out clear incentives: provoke as many activating emotions as possible; lie, spin, dog-whistle; drop red pill after red pill; step up to the line repeatedly, in creative new ways.”

She concludes:

Still, after his long time hanging with the worst of digital humanity, Marantz appears to believe that the arc of history does bend. To get it to point back to justice, he notes, we will have to do the heavy lifting ourselves.

Heave ho.