Basically, the article says that large, capital owned social networks are plagued by what the Internet traditionally calls trolls. It also says that they could moderate down the trolls, but that they don’t.
These are the facts.
Therefore, the logical conclusion is that these vast networks actually want the trolls. I am not entirely sure why, although we all know that trolls drive engagement. That may be a sufficient explanation but the owners of the networks may have further reasons we do not know. After all, we know precious little about their financing and about their business models now that they have achieved market dominance.
But yes, they want the trolls. That is why moderation always fail.
Indeed, it’s rather specious to say “you can’t opt out of being terrorized by psychopathic trollies who have been poisoned by Alex Jones and the like” when there are “poisoners” with considerably more reach.
I do kind of like the idea that if big corporations are broken up, then people will be free to find some sort of “shard” with moderation policies they can agree with – such that people who don’t like one set of moderation policies can go find somewhere they are more comfortable with, rather than burdening some overworked and underpaid moderator. It seems clear that trying to find a single light-handed policy that can be consistently applied to everyone just isn’t going to work.
