What Can You Do About Social Media Trolls?

• Author: Birdsong, Nicholas
• Position: ETHICS - Column

An ethics-based pitch for elected officials using social media might point to the potential for free services like Facebook or Twitter to enhance transparency and citizen engagement. But these and other platforms often become breeding grounds for divisive arguments.

Trolls--social media users whose posts are intended to provoke angry responses--can ruin the social media experience by spamming off-topic, false, inflammatory or abusive messages. Constructive commentary can be buried beneath an avalanche of personal insults or vulgar rants about often irrelevant matters.

Officials could block disruptive users from their pages. Every major platform provides an option to block specific users, with some allowing comment removal or censorship. Censoring bad actors could help prevent toxic environments from forming and result in more productive dialogue.

However, the ends might not matter if the means are unconstitutional. In 2018, a federal district court found that the First Amendment prohibited the president from blocking individuals on Twitter for expressing critical viewpoints. The same rule might apply to state legislators.

Establishing constitutional, viewpoint-neutral restrictions can be difficult to get right. Hours spent drafting the right policy or removing obscenities, for example, might be better spent engaging with constituents. And thanks to the continuing development of this area of law, some uncertainty may surround even a carefully crafted censorship policy.

Some officials might fear that not removing hate speech or offensive comments could be viewed as implicit endorsement of those messages, but few would accuse NASA of promoting conspiracy theories for not removing flat-Earther comments on Instagram. Legislators would be at a similarly low risk of blame for not actively moderating the posts of third parties.

A hands-off approach might not do much to counteract the trolls, but it avoids the work and risks of censoring posts while arguably best embodying free speech values. At least according...