“Don’t Feed the Trolls” Is Even Better Advice Than it Used to Be

You should think long and hard before sharing this tweet with the world. Unfortunately, the people who most need this advice are the least likely to heed it.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Over at the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf calls out lefty call-out culture. It’s become so excessive, he says, that Twitter mobs routinely go ballistic over the smallest, most inadvertent micro-slights, even those from folks who are basically on their side:

I don’t understand why they believe that extreme anger and stigma should be directed at people whose intentions and substantive beliefs are so close to their own….

I don’t understand why they dedicate so much energy and focus to what even they call microaggressions at a time when an ascendant coalition in American politics is bent on deporting as many immigrants as possible….

I don’t understand how they think they can defeat that nativist faction if their own pro-immigrant coalition engages in divisive infighting over transgressions as inevitable as clumsy wording….

Even if every object of dragging deserved it, I don’t understand how the outcome could be anything other than punishing an infinitesimal percentage of bad actors while turning off so many with the excesses that it provokes a backlash.

Over at Vox, I think Ezra Klein coincidentally provides most of the answer in an interview with Tristan Harris:

Ezra Klein: I had Jaron Lanier on this podcast a couple months ago, and he said something I’ve been thinking about since then. He said that the key to a lot of social media is [that] negative emotions engage more powerfully than positive emotions. Do you think he’s right about that?

Tristan Harris: Oh, absolutely. Outrage just spreads faster than something that’s not outrage. When you open up the blue Facebook icon, you’re activating the AI, which tries to figure out the perfect thing it can show you that’ll engage you. It doesn’t have any intelligence, except figuring out what gets the most clicks. The outrage stuff gets the most clicks, so it puts that at the top….If the first thing you do when your eyes open is see Twitter and there’s a bunch of stuff to be outraged about, that’s going to do something to you on an animal level.

Journalists as a group evaluate social media poorly, and we evaluate Twitter especially poorly. Think about how Twitter works. There are a very few influencers who are determined to root out and denounce anything that’s even remotely problematic. They do this mostly via absurdly hostile readings of other tweets or by making connections that most people would never notice. Nonetheless, once that bell is rung, it can’t be unrung—and their followers all rush in to denounce the micro-slight in question. Why do the influencers do this? Because they’re zealots, and that’s what zealots do. And why do they attract mobs who follow them so uncritically? Because those are the kinds of mobs zealots always attract.

It’s exhausting to be on the receiving end of this stuff, but it’s truly meaningless. There will always be zealots and their mobs looking for outrages to slay. And while Twitter makes them more visible, their numbers are still tiny. A few hundred? A few thousand? That’s nothing considering the minuscule effort it takes to dash off a bit of tweetrage. Unless a Twitter mob gets into the 10-100,000 range, it simply doesn’t represent anything important.

Even among the far reaches of the left, I imagine that most people agree with Friedersdorf that outrage is a stupid response to micro-slights. So the answer to his bewilderment, I think, is twofold. First, social media is a magnet for outrage, and the platforms themselves encourage this because it keeps people engaged and delivers more eyeballs to their advertisers. Second, even given this, the number of people outraged by micro-slights is truly insignificant. Social media tidal waves, in which a few thousand responses rain down within a couple of hours, merely make them seem big.

If you ignore small Twitter mobs—and by small, I mean at least anything under 10,000 tweets—most of the paradoxes and conundrums of the social justice zealots go away almost instantly.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate