(2017-08-21) How Hate Groups Forced Online Platforms To Reveal Their True Nature

John Herrman: How Hate Groups Forced Online Platforms to Reveal Their True Nature

The platforms’ sudden action in response to an outpouring of public grief and rage resembles, at first glance, a moral awakening and suggests a mounting sense of responsibility to the body politic.

But this is an incomplete accounting of what happened

The recent rise of all-encompassing internet platforms promised something unprecedented and invigorating: venues that unite all manner of actors — politicians, media, lobbyists, citizens, experts, corporations — under one roof.

This felt and functioned like Freedom, but it was always a commercial simulation. (Theme-Park)

In the process of building private communities, these companies had put on the costumes of liberal democracies.

But as major internet platforms have grown to compose a greater share of the public sphere, playing host to consequential political organization — not to mention media — their internal contradictions have become harder to ignore.

What gave these trolls power on platforms wasn’t just their willingness to act in bad faith and to break the rules and norms of their environment. It was their understanding that the Game-Rules and norms of platforms were self-serving and cynical in the first place.