Complete Story
07/10/2017
The Trance of Dysfunction
Why trolls have come to dominate discourse
With the emergence of the internet, trolls received an unexpected gift — a borderless, highly engineered megaphone with a “record” button, which allowed them to reach farther and repeatedly, without any real negative repercussions. Snide asides became memes. Potshots were echoed and passed around. Ironically, instead of cultivating more discourse, the internet has potentially restricted and redefined it, placing the trolls at the top of the pyramid with their shameless embrace of the power granted to them by digital means. And because the substrate they use is engineered, trolls also have access to new tools that make them even more pernicious.
Their power may be as much based on economics as anything else — that is, there is no reason for many Internet companies to address the troll problem. From the moment the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) absolved platforms of liability for content posted using their tools, the trolls have had an open field on which to work. Recently, in an interview on Kara Swisher’s Recode Decode podcast, there was an exchange between Scott Galloway, an NYU business school professor and founder of L2, and Swisher, about this “platform” distinction.
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