How making politicians unblock trolls could hurt speech online - The Verge
▻https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/6/20847366/politicians-twitter-trolls-blocking-legal-ruling-trump-ocasio-cortez-free-
Last week, the Knight First Amendment Institute urged Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to unblock critics on Twitter. The Knight Institute has led a push to treat politicians’ social media accounts as public forums, filing a successful lawsuit against President Donald Trump for his Twitter-blocking habits. Ocasio-Cortez argued that the issue was more nuanced, though: she said she was blocking “less than 20 accounts” and that it was for harassment, not political viewpoints.
Social media poses some unique problems that physical spaces don’t, however. It can operate at a scale that wouldn’t be possible offline, and it’s easy to hijack a conversation or amplify a point of view with automated posts or a handful of dedicated people acting in bad faith. Trolls can attack anyone who participates in a conversation, not just politicians, and they can do it across all of social media, not just in a single thread or post. This can turn supposedly open spaces into deeply hostile or unnavigable ones — not just for public figures like Trump or Ocasio-Cortez, but for anybody who wants to engage with them.
As writer and law professor Tim Wu, journalist Zeynep Tufekci, and many others have pointed out, new tactics like troll armies and spammed responses have made traditional First Amendment protections less effective at promoting free speech online. “It is no longer speech or information that is scarce, but the attention of listeners,” explained Wu in a 2017 Knight Institute blog post. “No one quite anticipated that speech itself might become a censorial weapon, or that scarcity of attention would become such a target of flooding and similar tactics.”