Trolls, Black Panther, and the Battle for the Internet

The average American spent 12 hours and one minute each day consuming some form of media in 2017 according to a report by eMarketer. Slightly more than half our days are now spent on smart phones, television, social media, and so on. The same report determined that the average American spent 3.17 hours on mobile devices and another 2.03 hours on desktop or laptop computers every day.

In early 2017, Nielson Company published a report that found that middle-aged Americans spend more time viewing social media than millennials, bucking the popular assumption that young people are uniquely addicted to digital content.

In short, Americans of all ages spend a massive amount of time absorbing information via the Internet. In light of that fact, it is important to understand what we are absorbing and who is providing it. These questions are all the more notable after major social media companies reported to Congress in October that inflammatory information posted by Russian agents had reached 126 million users on Facebook in 2015 through some of 2017. The same Russian agents uploaded over 1,000 videos on YouTube and posted 131,000 messages on Twitter during the same time period, and that is not an inexhaustible list of created content. Although this information is disturbing, it shouldn’t have come as any great surprise considering each of the United States’ major intelligence agencies had determined that Russia had deliberately meddled in the 2016 election, which included generating divisive online content, several months prior to social media companies admitting they had been abused by Kremlin-linked troll farms.

In his prepared statement before Congress, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch said, “foreign actors, hiding behind fake accounts, abused our platform and other Internet services to try and sow division and discord — and to try to undermine our election process.” He then described these actions as “an assault on democracy.” The fact that there is still any question in the American public’s mind as to whether this in fact occurred, and is still occurring, is a testament to just how successful the electronic assault has been. We are divided.

But we need not look as far as Russia for examples of how the weaponized and irresponsible abuse of the Internet can warp reality toward division. There are near-endless daily examples of the way domestic Internet trolls sow division, anger, and contempt. Take something as innocuous as the Rotten Tomatoes page for the upcoming Marvel film, Black Panther. The movie features a Marvel Comics superhero created in 1966 who is the monarch of a fictional African nation. In light of the geography, it should come as no surprise that a large portion of the cast is black and the characters are African. Before the movie’s release, Internet trolls flooded Rotten Tomatoes’ audience comment section with provocative rhetoric. One wrote that a new superhero movie “that is pro black and [has] far left values to the point of annoyance is not worth the 10 bucks.” Another described it as “Affirmative Action The Movie.” Another indicated, “I fully expect it to be super saturated with social justice including explicit anti-white and anti-police themes.” And the absurdities go on and on in the full range of Internet misspellings, cursing, and grammatical errors:

Every one of these strange, racially divisive and negative posts were written under accounts that have now been deleted, as was the case with every similar-in-tone post I took the time to click on. They aren’t real people. They are trolls comprised of a much smaller population than the posts reflect. In the last week, Rotten Tomatoes has removed many of the more offensive posts, including a handful of blatantly racist expressions and memes invented and widely circulated on white supremacist and white nationalist websites and forums on 4chan and Reddit. Again, these comments appeared before the movie was even released. They had not watched it. Sight unseen, these trolls would have us believe that this movie is an oppressively politically correct, anti-white, anti-police, liberal-pandering, racist film just because it features predominately black characters in Africa. It would be like complaining that Hotel Rwanda was “too black.” It is absurd, and that is because the comments are not an accurate reflection of real Americans. But wading through the endless and polarizing nonsense on the Internet can sometimes make that difficult to remember. Anyone who has spent more than two minutes reading YouTube comments can feel their faith in humanity wavering.

Everyone doesn’t have to love superhero movies. Everyone doesn’t have to love this movie. And although the online treatment of a comic book movie is somewhat trivial, the collective sum of bile contained in seemingly inconsequential online content significantly impacts the information our brains consume several hours per day. The toxic nonsense in this small corner of the Internet has a number of negative effects for people of all political spectrums.

First, it seeks to delegitimize the profitability and appropriateness of media featuring black people or other less represented groups in media by defining it in a negative light from both political perspectives: somehow both racist and oppressively politically correct all at once. If they can stifle interest, they can control how the population at large perceives the film. They can attempt to preempt or taint the success of a film that accepts black characters as legitimate at face value by transforming them into boogeymen; the (insert: liberal, PC, racist, anti-police, black) agenda.

Second, it creates a false dichotomy that white conservatives are intrinsically anti-black racists or that black characters and actors are intrinsically anti-white, liberal pawns, or excessively politically correct. Black people aren’t anti-white, politically correct, or racially charged; they are people. They, like anyone, have stories to tell in film and other media. If that sounds absurdly apparent, that is because it is. Any real human with any measure of compassion knows that. And yet, trolls want us to buy a world where blackness itself is race-bait, “liberal,” or even racist and where it is normal and acceptable for conservatives to be indignant at the very concept of a film starring predominately black actors playing black characters in a region populated by predominately black people. It is unfair and vilifying to everyone. It creates fabricated boundaries between people that feed meaningless, gratuitous conflict. It tempts conservatives to agree with its ludicrous, racist outrage while tempting liberals to identify its synthetic racism with conservatives at large. And that is the point. These fake comments aren’t about Black Panther, liberals, or conservatives, it’s about deliberately creating division along a point of tension by making people feel far more detached from one another than they really are. It is designed to drive us to extremes by accepting these polarizing representations of ourselves and each other.

Hope is in resisting these grotesque caricatures that trolls, foreign and domestic, have created for us. In December Facebook quietly created a method on its help page of gauging a profile’s interactions with the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm. Certainly social media sites must shoulder some responsibility in combating this noxious practice. But the only way we can save ourselves from trolls is by improving our media literacy, emotional discipline, and empathy. Our ability to do this on the Russian front has been impeded by an administration who refuses to admit what its own intelligence apparatus and the social media companies themselves have already determined: that a hostile foreign government continues efforts to manipulate and divide us online. Donald Trump has a personal stake in denying that reality because it risks diminishing his own misleading narrative regarding his supposedly “historic” electoral victory. Meanwhile, his re-definition of “fake news” to mean primarily mainstream news outlets that criticize his administration, even as he irresponsibly tweets objectively fake information from identified hate groups, has weakened our ability to combat the dissemination of actual fabrications. Instead of weakening trolls he has become their king. But this denial of reality ignores the big picture. For example, immediately following Trump’s election, the Internet Research Agency disseminated information seeking to foster the notion that the election itself was not legitimate, after a year of amplifying and echoing Trump’s divisive campaign rhetoric. It wasn’t about Trump, it was about destabilizing our democratic process. We must have a greater determination to reject temporarily beneficial but toxic influences because the other shoe will eventually drop, and then the other one again, and so on.

As a word of warning, it is tempting to believe that we alone among mankind are impervious to suggestibility. As more evidence came to light regarding Russia’s hand in disseminating divisive content during the 2016 election cycle, it became a relatively popular, reactionary sentiment that no matter what information had been produced by hostile foreign government that our minds were entirely our own. No one, certainly not Russia, could have possibly manipulated the public! This is a mistake, and the $182.52 billion spent on advertising in the United States last year indicates that our suggestibility is not negligible. State-sponsored propaganda campaigns spanning centuries and nations, including in the United States, were not done for nothing.

We can’t expect the behavior of Internet trolls worldwide to improve. We should not count on our government leaders or social media giants to elevate our discourse. At the end of the day, if we truly want to hate one another so badly, the Internet will give us every opportunity to do so. It will give us every avenue for the United States to eat itself alive, weakened through disunity and discord. The alternative is to reject the false narratives of Internet trolls, accept that we have more in common than we have differences, and seek compromise, compassion, and empathy across politically convenient and routinely exploited dividing lines such as race, religion, sexual orientation, and political preference.