A sad hallmark of the "Internet Age" has been the emergence of what have become known as “trolls” — individuals or bots that aim to derail or dominate conversations with shocking, inflammatory, ad hominem, profane and/or hateful attacks. The personalities are not new — we’ve all known people who’ve held opinions that were questionable, if not even slightly dangerous. But in the old analog world bounded by space and time, the effects of these people could be measured in feet and minutes — you might have to listen to them a few feet away for a few minutes, but their impact would diminish as you moved away and moved on, and their influence was circumscribed by physical boundaries.

With the emergence of the internet, trolls received an unexpected gift — a borderless, highly engineered megaphone with a “record” button, which allowed them to reach farther and repeatedly, without any real negative repercussions. Snide asides became memes. Potshots were echoed and passed around. Ironically, instead of cultivating more discourse, the internet has potentially restricted and redefined it, placing the trolls at the top of the pyramid with their shameless embrace of the power granted to them by digital means. And because the substrate they use is engineered, trolls also have access to new tools that make them even more pernicious.

Their power may be as much based on economics as anything else — that is, there is no reason for many Internet companies to address the troll problem. From the moment the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) absolved platforms of liability for content posted using their tools, the trolls have had an open field on which to work. Recently, in an interview on Kara Swisher’s Recode Decode podcast, there was an exchange between Scott Galloway, an NYU business school professor and founder of L2, and Swisher, about this “platform” distinction.

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