Racist trolls are not racists. They are trolls who use racism to fan the culture wars and they’re good at it. Racism is terrible but when people resort to using racism for ulterior motives, things turn truly dark.
Let me explain why I make this claim. We all know how social media, especially Facebook, have turned into echo chambers where people get fed the stories that affirm their convictions. This helps people to find likeminded folk but has the negative side-effect of accelerating confirmation bias, i.e. the tendency of people to want to have their existing beliefs and theories confirmed. So if people, without realizing it, only see messages that affirm their ideas on a platform that otherwise promises them an open window to the world of networked people, the marketplace of ideas, confirmation bias does double duty. “The world is truly the way I see it,” they think.
Ok, we know this. We’ve been through this with the 2016 US presidential elections, the role Cambridge Analytic played in this and the likely involvement of Russian sources. Facebook took a real hit and is more careful than ever with Russian trolls. But not enough apparently.
Yesterday I became furious upon learning that there is a Facebook group, Christians Against Google, that calls for “Justice for Gregory and Travis McMichael.” The post said that “these 2…
