Politicized Trolling Is Worse Than Fake News
Orchestrated attacks on social media are more destructive than propaganda or campaigns of deception.
Milo Yiannopoulos could command armies.
Photographer: Don Arnold/WireImage via Getty Images
Online disinformation and the spread of deceptive political messages are pernicious, but they aren’t necessarily the worst abuse of social networks by governments and political actors. Rational people are resistant to propaganda, and irrational ones only consume messages that stroke their confirmation biases. No one, however, can be impervious to personal attacks on a mass scale.
A report by the human rights lawyer Carly Nyst and Oxford University researcher Nick Monaco is an early attempt to study the phenomenon of state-sponsored trolling, or the digital harassment of critics. The case studies come from a diverse set of countries: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Ecuador, the Philippines, Turkey, the U.S. and Venezuela. They complement what is already known about the practice in Russia, whose achievements in the field of digital abuse have generated the most interest to date.