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When the Trolls Come Marching In [1]

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Date: 2025-02-20

You’d like to think the hatred in the world these days won’t touch you much, but it can. It’s everywhere. Even in my humdrum discussion board on Reddit. Hatred is trying to take it over.

I’m one of several moderators for a subreddit (discussion board) called r/sanabalon; it exists as a discussion space for the people of San Abalon, California and anybody else who takes an interest. “San Abalon” is not it’s real name.

San Abalon is full of great people, many of them with strong opinions and limited self-control. We mods keep order so that everyone can speak their mind and feel safe in it. “Be kind,” our rules say. It seems to work, with enforcement. And if it doesn’t, we ban. A lot of the people we ban aren’t locals: just trolls looking for trouble.

Last week somebody posted an article about a long-time resident who’d been arrested by ICE and deported back to Mexico. He’d worked locally 20 years as a respected handyman, sending money home. He also had three drunk driving arrests which, he admitted, probably was why he in particular was deported.

That post drew a lot of comments. San Abalon’s known as a liberal town, but opinions on anything are all over the map. Send him home, some posted; he’s a menace. But other’s countered on the side of mercy and good character. I didn’t like everything I read, but they are the locals and if opinions were strong, personal attacks were at a minimum. A rainbow of opinions: good stuff.

I walked away for a few minutes and by the time I came back, dozens of new comments had rolled in: all similar, all negative. “He’s had three drunk driving arrests? He’s a menace to the community! Deport him!” Over and over. Positive comments were overwhelmed. The tenor of the comments had gone from mixed to almost completely negative. And the negative comments kept pouring in.

Reddit has a filter called crowd control that mods can use when too many new comments threaten to overwhelm a post. I have crowd control set to send post comments from new users and users with negative ratings to a review queue instead of directly to the original post. Those settings didn’t stop these comments. So I reset the filter to also filter out all comments from redditors who don’t subscribe to the sub.

Bingo. The new comments stopped rolling into the post. Instead, they went directly to the review queue, dozens and soon hundreds. More every minute. All these comments were from — I assume — supporters of Trump and MAGA who’d come here to overwhelm opposing opinions. To look like the future. But how did they know to come here?

I took a quick trip to a sort of moderator locker room subreddit where mods can get quick advice from other mods. The mos there told me to check the number of times that the post had been shared. In Reddit, you can “share” a post you like in one subreddit with multiple other subreddits so that it appears in all of them. I checked; the original post had been shared with over 100 different subreddits, and I’m pretty sure that many of them were MAGA- or Trump oriented. You can raise a mob fast on reddit if you know how.

I locked the post so that no more new comments could be added. And that was it. The only work remaining: clean those hundreds of comments out of the queue. Which was a pain. But I have some ieas that might help.

And… the same thing kept happening: several times this past week. A very large anti-Trump rally took place in town, and several people of course posted articles about it to r/sanabalon. And the posts were copiously cross-posted and the trolls soon came marching in again, in large numbers, with uniformly negative opinions.

They caught me off-guard at first, but soon Crowd Control was sending the vast majority of negative comments to the review queue. Because they weren’t us; they weren’t members. They were here to drown out the true opinions of r/sanabalon.

And it’s happening across Reddit. r/sanabulon gets only 15 or 20 posts a day, so we few mods can handle this. But other Reddit subs get hundreds of posts a day. When the trolls come marching in to post after post, the mods of those subs struggle to keep up. Reddit is sending out missives telling mods to use Crowd Control with extreme prejudice and, well, try to hang in there. They’re even organizing a volunteer corps of mods who will temporarily work or overwhelmed subs.

That’s what lies try to do, and liars: drown out the truth so that it can’t be heard. Make a new echo chamber and hope that people get lost in it. Donald Trump is the god of lies, and he has many disciples.

We need to say the truth as much as possible, and keep saying it. Lies are the closest thing to magic that humans have achieved, and always has been. Lies can make a good man into an buffoon in the minds of the crowd, and make a bad man look like a savior. You’ve seen it. But when the markets crash and businesses close their doors and people find themselves without hope again, the magic fades. That’s when real answers can jump in and take the magic’s place.

I hope we get some of those real answers. And soon.

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