Late last year, Twitter was shopping itself around to technology and media companies, hoping someone would buy the ailing social media network.
According to those in the know, the most likely buyer was Disney, but the company quickly denied the rumours and backed away from the sale. The story goes that the House of Mouse did not want to be associated with the world's biggest troll factory, the kind of platform that would send a woman thousands of death threats a second for the crime of appearing in a Ghostbusters reboot.
At the time, Twitter gave some lip service to the idea of defeating its trolls. To its credit, it removed the account that was seen as one of the greatest ring leaders, Milo Yiannopoulos. I naively thought the company may be starting to take the problem seriously, and would work out a way to silence trolls or at least regulate them down to their own awful alt-Twitter.
But as 2017 begins, how can Twitter even begin to tackle trolls, when the biggest on its network is now leader of the free world?
Every forum has a troll: the kind of people who seem permanently drunk and angry behind their keyboard, bashing out incoherent replies to other members long after the moment has passed, long after everyone else has gone to bed. President Trump has exhibited this behaviour from the moment he began tweeting.
Trolls on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube and other social media platforms create a real problem for their liberal-leaning Sillcon Valley hosts. Just as state governments will wring their hands about the problems of gambling while becoming ever more addicted to the revenue pokie machines bring in, Silicon Valley claims to want to fight trolls, but their actions tell another story. Twitter has made real money from Trump's rants, and Reddit admits the sub-reddit the_donald was a profit centre for the site.
Beyond income, Trump has given Twitter the kind of relevance it hasn't enjoyed in years, as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat dwarfed the company in that one metric Wall Street cares about, monthly active users. And as depressing as this is, trolls even help the monthly active user count. Every great troll will have an army of angry "egg accounts" behind him (it's always a him) to yell and bully those they disagree with.
Closer to home, our own elected officials behave just as badly. While the tragic events of the Bourke Street mall were still unfolding, Senator David Leyonhjelm thought it was the perfect opportunity to grab the spotlight and argue, once again, for relaxed gun laws.
Regardless of your views on his politics, or on gun control, the tweet was the act of a troll — a post designed to anger rational people, and make light of a tragic situation.
All of this makes Twitter the surprising frontrunner of social networks I dread opening each day, and the one I'm closest to quitting. I always assumed I'd quit Facebook after an egregious privacy change, but it remains the most efficient way for me to share adorable baby photos with family. No matter what else it does, it's a network that makes me feel good for the most part.
And while it's true your Twitter timeline is what you make it, I'm not sure what more I can do to feel good about the service I've loved and championed for more than 10 years.
Like Ned Flander's cable service, I block more accounts than I follow, and still the trolls pop up. But I know I can never really leave. I'm trapped with Twitter. I need it for work, I need it to follow technology, to follow the world. But the majority of conversations I'd once have publicly on Twitter, I now have privately on Slack, to avoid morons butting in. It's a sorry state of affairs, but perhaps that just shows Twitter best reflects the world we're living in today.
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