The care and feeding of trolls

FOR an exercise in finding out just how patient you can be with a stranger, try reading the comments section after a hot-button story. I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re tired and just relieved to have gotten through the day. But if you’re curious about what your fellow citizens think, it’s an exercise that can offer some eye-openers. For instance, a tweet from the @sunstarcebu account, with a link to a story about last Wednesday’s anti-Marcos protests, provoked one follower to write that he thought people should get angry with the protesters, “angry to the point of violence.” What exactly he meant by that, I didn’t ask. His words reminded me of what the American actress Brie Larson said of trolls who had sent her hateful comments. She imagined they were in the grip of “adrenalized loneliness” and that it was precisely that loneliness that was making them lash out. She also found that if she responded to them charitably, many of them replied in the same way. Some even apologized.

“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Stephen Covey gave this advice in 1989, when trolling was still confined to the chat rooms where early adopters of the internet met. It remains useful advice these days, when trolls have become more pervasive and have more tools at their disposal to bully others or simply drown out other voices.

You see, I have an issue with the most common advice you’ll find on dealing with trolls, which is, “Don’t feed the trolls.”

I understand it’s the prudent position to take. The reasoning behind this is that trolls aren’t there to listen to you or debate with you the way a rational, well-meaning citizen would. Their goals are to confuse (hence the spread of fake news stories or “weaponized false information”) and to create a situation so toxic that potential critics are shushed. Untold numbers of them get paid to do so. This is what passes for a meaningful livelihood for some of them, and it’s reportedly one that pays well.

Yet retreating to the safety of our echo chambers comes at a cost. Hidden among the trolls, nearly dwarfed by the noise and confusion they generate, are genuine reactions from fellow citizens who feel they have been shut out of the discussion. And that discussion really shouldn’t be confined to which politicians we support or not, but about finding some common ground, where we can exchange ideas for fixing deep-seated problems.

When he wrote about trolling for The New York Times magazine (“The Trolls Among Us,” August 2008), Mattathias Schwartz raised these questions: “Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying ‘uncle’?”

The health of our communities depends on our commitment to finding answers to such questions. For now, I’ve decided that if there are facts I can offer to address a comment, then I will do so. I will call out lies when I can. But I will also assume that most of the reactions, no matter how uncivil or illinformed they may seem, come from a genuine concern for our country and its future. It would be so much easier to turn away. But I’m not going to give up just yet.