Film Crit Hulk wrote an article for The Verge called “Don’t feed the trolls, and other hideous lies,” and it’s excellent from start to finish. Here are a couple of my favorite bits:
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are now so large that they are considered “unmoderatable” communities. We like to pretend this was a pure facet of their size, but it is inescapably a part of their ethos. They are platforms forged in the fires of troll culture, founded and operated by techno-libertarians who didn’t understand why they had to care about any of this. They set out with no intention to moderate at all. Zuckerberg just wanted to rate hot girls, after all. But in 2018, the staggering effects of non-moderation are just starting to hit them, and they have little idea how to address or even intellectually engage with the idea. […]
It all harkens back to Cliff Pervocracy’s analogy of the “missing stair,” where everyone works around the obvious dangers of a situation because they are so used to “dealing with it” by outright ignoring it. If someone speaks up about the danger, they are dismissed. Why complain when you can “just hop over” the missing stair? But on a systemic level, it all adds up to something so much more than a mere missing stair. For many people on the internet — especially women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community — it is an entire broken staircase, full of loose nails, jutting floorboards, and impossible leaps. And there are so many others who don’t notice it because they either get to use the elevator or are already on the top floor.
That second paragraph is a really nice and succinct explanation of why I’ve always had pretty good success ignoring the trolls: because I’ve had a pretty comprehensive set of privileges going for me. Most of that didn’t really dawn on me until sometime around the worst of Gamergate. Guys like me were making fun of Nerds Angry About Girls In Video Games, but we never seemed to catch a lot of flak, especially not compared to what women saying the same thing caught.
It definitely strikes me as weird that big tech platforms just abandoned the idea of moderating their platform at all. I guess that says more about the kinds of people who can afford to start a company in their dorm room than it says about the users, but at least the users can get some better advice than “don’t feed the trolls.”