According to Ellen Pao, Trolls Are Winning the Internet–But There’s Still So Much Hope

Ellen Pao took to The Washington Post to share her thoughts on the firestorm that’s been raining over reddit for the past few weeks and how that’s shaped her current opinion on the state of the internet. She wrote about the attacks she faced during her tenure as reddit’s interim CEO, but that wasn’t the focus of what she wrote. She took her experiences and placed them under the greater lens of how the internet has changed, and most importantly, considers where it’s going in the future.

Pao looked at her attacks as a sign of where the internet currently lies in terms of its association with the world at large. The internet, which was intended to be a tool for fostering positive, educational communication has quickly become a tool through which harassers and trolls shout down and silence others. Now that we’re at a critical mass, major content providers like reddit are expected to help filter and police the content that passes through their channels.

But Pao believes that’s a task that’s likely to fail. She writes:

To understand the challenges facing today’s Internet content platforms, layer onto that original balancing act a desire to grow audience and generate revenue. A large portion of the Internet audience enjoys edgy content and the behavior of the more extreme users; it wants to see the bad with the good, so it becomes harder to get rid of the ugly. But to attract more mainstream audiences and bring in the big-budget advertisers, you must hide or remove the ugly.

That’s the crux of the entire problem. To try to balance the idea of free, open speech (whatever that might mean to you) with ensuring users are safe and protected is a Herculean Sisyphean task. She maintains that the onus is on the users–not the moderators, not the site administrators–to police each other. This is a task that isn’t handled from the top-down, but it’s one that’s handled amongst ourselves.

It’s not a cop out. It’s the truth. Most websites exist to bring in revenue, which they can’t exactly do if they gain a reputation for being wretched hives of scum and villainy. Mainstream advertisers (and more importantly, investors) won’t touch them. And it seems these days that the more you resist against these baser elements of the internet, the more you attract the kinds of trolls and awful things that call those baser elements home.

Pao says that it was the supportive messages from users that have allowed her to maintain a sense of hope for the internet. Which is saying something, considering the terrible, awful things directed her way.

For her, “In the battle for the Internet, the power of humanity to overcome hate gives me hope. I’m rooting for the humans over the trolls. I know we can win.”

We can. We must. And we will.

(image via Flickr/Christopher Michel)

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