Right-Wing Backlash: How a Small Group of Deranged Trolls Can Ruin Any Event-Lazy Democracy

Sci-Fi’s Right-Wing Backlash: How a Small Group of Deranged Trolls Can Ruin Any Event
Lazy democracy is like an open comments section -- left unmoderated and unguided, the worst people take over.
By Arthur Chu / Salon
April 7, 2015

I say that this kind of thing is “new” but really it’s just the right-wing Internet returning to form. Back in the mid-2000s we had the slang term “freep this poll.” It was a phrase used to rally posters on the Free Republic to mass-flood a poll or comments section hosted by some random website or local newspaper in order to create the impression of an overwhelming majority supporting their fringe-right views.

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One of the false promises we’ve been made that people keep buying into is that the Internet is a “democratizing” force, that the digital world gives us instant access to the real vox populi, that the simple fact that anyone can leave a comment, or answer a poll, or submit an entry to a contest means that everyone does, and therefore opinion of “the Internet” is everyone’s opinion.

This is obviously false. It’s obviously false for the same reason that crowd-funding randomly decides to give one guy in Ohio hundreds of thousands of dollars for potato salad and why huge blatant hoaxes can stay up on Wikipedia for five years unchallenged, and why random, not-particularly-charismatic people become “celebrities” overnight for no good reason.

It’s obviously false in the way that comments sections actually representing “reader reactions” as opposed to a horrific cesspool of three people shouting racial slurs at each other is false. Everyone who says “Never Read the Comments”–which, these days, is anyone with any sense–is implicitly admitting the promise of Internet democracy has failed.

The problem with democracy in general isn’t so much that people are “stupid” or “evil” or the other nasty things that people who rag on democracy like to throw out, it’s that there’s a ton of decisions to make and people are busy. The “vote” doesn’t end up being among everyone but among the tiny subset of people who really care about that question, which isn’t necessarily correlated with being right about that question–often, in fact, it’s the opposite.

The people who pay the most attention to these questions are the people who have some deep emotional investment in the issue at hand combined with a great deal of time and emotional energy to burn making their “voices heard” about it. That can happen on any end of the political spectrum, but in practice? It tends to be a space dominated by privileged reactionary jerks.

People who study real elections know all about this. In fact, political strategists count on it–the fact that there’s a ton of people who can only be bothered to vote every four years rather than every two is exactly why there’s a conservative tilt to midterm elections and why some voices have called for compulsory voting to eliminate the disproportionate influence dedicated voters–who tend to be “values voting” zealots–have on Congress.

But what’s somewhat true of real elections is overwhelmingly true of Internet elections. No public forum for comment can exist long without being taken over by “the trolls”–and while the trolls sometimes do things just for the lulz, like trying to rig a Taylor Swift fan contest to force her on a date with a creepy 4chan dude, this kind of free-form anarchic subversion of online elections is becoming a thing of the past.

Long Interesting Read continued at:

http://www.alternet.org/culture/sci-fis-right-wing-backlash-how-small-group-deranged-trolls-can-ruin-any-event