How Blocking (Trump) Trolls Led to an Unexpected Epiphany
Or why we should be grateful for having Trump
It all started during the US presidential election in 2016. The debates were heated, even more heated than usual, and tension rose by a day. On the one hand, we had a woman who could become the first female president in the history of the United States, on the other a man who more often than not came across as a misogynist.
With that alone, the election campaign was set for disaster. Trump supporters were willing to blindly hold everything against Hilary while letting Trump get away with most anything, and Hilary’s supporters couldn’t stand Trump and his tweets. The whole situation soon escalated into an online war.
The level of hatred reached unimaginable proportions. Insults and slurs flew all over the place, leaving precious little that could be called a reasonable debate. It was disturbing and it led to a blocking spree.
Democrats tend to block and unfriend more often than Republicans
At that point, the results of the survey conducted by PRRI were published. According to the poll, Democrats tend to unfriend or block people on social media due to their political views 3-times more often than Republicans.
I shared the results on Facebook curious to learn what was going on. My friend James Riley pointed out that this is so because the views of many Republicans are so way out of line that one simply cannot reason with them. I argued in return that one should be open to different points of views and try to debate these issues instead of blocking people.
Well, that was before I got my share of fervent Trump supporters who kept harassing me and ignored my repeated requests to stop trolling me for my anti-Trump or feminist views. They wouldn’t stop and they wouldn’t unfriend me. They preferred to harass. In the end, I was left with no other option but to start unfriending and blocking.
Trump supporters had a ball
Republicans, of course, were most pleased with the poll. They used it to claim how “wholly unsurprising” the results were.
According to the article Snowflake Alert: Guess Who’s Most Likely to Block You On Social Media Over Political Views published in The Daily Wire: “The Democrat Party has become increasingly intolerant, most notably on college campuses and “protest” spaces. In recent years, leftists have called for “safe spaces,” the censorship of so-called “hate speech” and have violently “protested” the democratic election of Republican Donald Trump…”
Repeatedly using a derogatory term ‘snowflake’ as an insult privately and in the media, is not exactly a sign of tolerance. But accusing the so-called ‘snowflakes’ of being intolerant instead of coming to terms with their own intolerance is the game Trump supporters love to play the most.
This becomes even clearer when we get familiar with a few additional facts. The Washington Post took a deeper look into a similar poll from a couple of years ago that had comparable results — conservatives seem to block and unfriend much less than liberals. It turned out, however, that there was already no diversity in the lives of the conservatives to begin with.
Two-thirds of the Republicans said they mostly have friends who share their political views, so that doesn’t leave many to block. Friends of the Democrats, in contrast, tend to be much more diverse. Posts on the social media accounts of consistent conservatives were also, differently for the liberals, “mostly or always in line with their views.”
Taking this information into account makes The Daily Wire’s presentation of ‘snowflakes’ as intolerant sound much like a demand for the tolerance of the conservative intolerance. Tolerance of intolerance, however, is an oxymoron — it’s incompatible with the essence of tolerance.
Reddit became a home base of radical Trump supporters
There is one thing radical Trump supporters are really good at — organizing themselves into online gangs specialized in trolling. They turned Reddit, one of the most popular social news websites, into their home base. I wasn’t aware of that and unwittingly stirred up a Hornet’s nest.
It began when I shared a post on Trump’s mental health in subreddits r/psychology, r/politics, and r/worldnews. The post took off, got on the first page, and all hell broke lose as a result. Most anything I post on Reddit since gets instantly downvoted in addition to a good portion of nasty comments.
I cannot use Reddit any longer to share the links to the articles I find interesting without being harassed, and I strongly suspect some of the Reddit trolls came after me on Medium as well, for I recently had to block and report quite a few people who trolled me or called me ‘a bitch.’
I’ve never experienced anything like that to such a degree before and I am not the only one who noticed. The well-organized and extremely active Reddit Trump trolls became such a phenomenon that FiveThirtyEight took the pains of analyzing Trump supporters on Reddit in detail.
They did an excellent job and I strongly recommend reading this most informative piece on the MO of the Trump’s supporters:
That’s where we uncover misogyny
I mentioned misogyny at the beginning of this post and it will now become clear why. There are intriguing telltale signs clearly pointing to it in both the poll results as well as the Reddit analysis.
The group that blocks by far the most are Democratic women with whooping 30%. Lagging far behind and ranging much closer together were male Democrats (with less than half of the leading score at 14%), Republican women (10%) and Republican men (8%).
Fortune speculated this surprising anomaly could have something to do with liberal women being more frequent targets of online trolls and the results of the FiveThrityEight Reddit analysis later showed that this could indeed be the case.
When they dissected subreddits to found those radical supporters of Donald Trump were most active in, the second place went to the misogynistic subreddit r/TheRedPill, while the first one r/fatpeoplehate was devoted to insulting overweight people and is now banned.
Clearly, radical Trump supporters are more than likely to be misogynists. But it’s the fact that while Reddit only saw it necessary to ban r/fatpeoplehate and the racist r/coontown, but allowed for the misogyny to continue, that is most troublesome.
It’s a reflection of how misogyny is still normalized in the society to a much higher degree than other forms of hate and discrimination. The latest news attest to this — Trump’s America seems to very much look up to how things are being done in Saudi Arabia:
So why should we be grateful for having Trump?
Conservatives have already created themselves a bubble and the most radical ones choose to leave it for one reason only — to troll everyone else, especially Democratic women. This in turn is forcing others into creating the bubbles of their own as the only way left to protect themselves from being a target of abuse. It created a society divided.
Donald Trump’s victory gave wings to this alarming trend, but also showed where America stands and how thing really are when one removes the shield of political correctness. And this is what we can thank Trump for. He exposed everything that is bad and wrong with this society, just like he promised, but not necessarily in the way we expected.
That’s huge and it was necessary. The problem with political correctness is that it forces people into restricting unacceptable behavior without truly reforming anyone. This leads to enforced suppression that creates internal tension and in the end manifests as anger, trolling, misogyny, and racism.
It that sense, political correctness too can be seen as a form of oppression, and here I can agree with conservatives that this is a big problem.
Political correctness only tackled the symptoms, but could not cure the underlying causes. It was inefficient and it quite possibly made the matters even worse. We do not need more political correctness, we need a radically different, new approach that would transform deeply instead of superficially trying to suppress how people feel about issues.
This is what Trump showed us, this is what people voted for, and this is what we can all, as weird as it may sound, be grateful for. Having this issues out in the open now makes it a lot easier to deal with them than when they were hidden in their covert forms. We cannot deny and downplay their existence any longer, but we can grab the bull by the horns.
Mateja started to write short stories at the age of ten and later became a freelance writer, radio personality, and counselor. Her life resembles a roller coaster ride full of ups and downs and some pretty wild turns. Among other things, her car was destroyed by tanks and she survived several brushes with death. She graduated in psychology from Arizona State University and is now a founder and editor at Transform the Pain and Personal Brain Whisperer, but her secret love is writing weird stories for The Rabbit Is In. Connect with Mateja on LinkedIn.
