Years of unhappy interactions with an online commenter compelled the publisher of MIT Technology Review to rethink how his site hosts conversations.
I have a troll. Writing as @zdzisiekm, or “Gus,” or under other names, he has commented on stories here on TechnologyReview.com 6,386 times and counting as of April 2017. As trolls go, he is unfailingly polite, and he doesn’t violate our site’s terms of service. Instead, he is reflexively, tendentiously wrong about a single topic, again and again. Gus is angry about our reporting on global warming and renewable energy technologies. His objections are notionally scientific, but they have a strongly ideological flavor.
Four years ago, commenting on “ Climate Change: The Moral Choices ,” @zdzisiekm characteristically wrote, “Having studied the relevant science literature quite extensively and in depth—I read hundreds of papers on the subject—there is no real ‘climate change threat.’ It’s all trumped up—the actual published peer-reviewed science is clear on this … This is because in some countries [economists] are so keen to switch the economy away from fossil fuels, they’ll go with any lie …”
Over our long association, Gus hasn’t changed. Last January, after reading “ What’s at Stake as Trump Takes Aim at Clean Energy Research,” he remarked, “None of the solutions fostered by the American Left a.k.a. the Democrats are affordable, safe, or … reliable. Adding intermittent energy sources to the grid has one effect only: it increases the cost of energy … As to safety, ask millions of bats and birds killed, blinded and fried in flight by windmills and solar installations. Ask people inconvenienced by the incessant annoying noise made by the windmills. Neither have these technologies created jobs … other than in China.”
It’s personal for @zdzisiekm; our interactions feel intimate and overheated. He has often denigrated my judgment and disparaged my qualifications. “This is really not your field,” he recently wrote me in an e-mail.
I know who Gus is, because I tracked him down. We ask readers to provide some personal information before they can comment, and he wasn’t hard to find. My troll is a sixtysomething technical advisor to the IT department of a large public university in the Midwest. He has not one but two PhDs—in electrical engineering and physics. He writes good research about computer architecture and bad poetry about cats. (I agreed not to use @zdzisiekm’s real name for this story. “I know you know who I am,” he said, “but I cherish my anonymity, and I don’t want people to throw bricks at my window or dent my car.”)
When I asked Gus why he wastes so much time and spirit commenting on our site, he replied, “It doesn’t take much of my time at all. I’ve got a personal database that I can quickly search for specific articles on various subjects of which I have, by now, tens of thousands.” This is true. Like many trolls, @zdzisiekm cuts and pastes the same memes into many comments. He especially likes a post that begins, “All global warming seen since 1880 has been less than the natural centennial global temperature variability,” followed by a cherry-picked list of papers from obscure journals with little or no peer review, meant to leave the impression that there is scientific debate about the causes of climate change.
Quizzed about his motives, Gus answered: “These are contentious and partisan issues. Let’s not kid ourselves that they are not. This is precisely why I would expect balance in reporting on these topics, especially of TR. I suggested in the past that it may be a good idea to publish opposite views, side by side, as WSJ does sometimes. If TR did so, why, there’d be less reason for me to comment. In contrast, TR has been rather biased in its climate and energy articles.” I tried to explain that we can’t publish the “opposite views”—that climate is not affected by industrial emissions, and that if global warming did turn out to be real, humans could effectively respond when it became a problem—because those views are not true. To no avail: @zdzisiekm is a hard scientist; I am an ignorant editor.
We receive comments similar in their scorn, if different in politics, from readers who believe we publish the “ PROPAGANDA AND LIES ” of Monsanto and other creators of genetically modified organisms, or who are convinced we suppress the truth about the “ filthy and unsound practice of vaccination ” and its links to autism. What all such readers share is a conspiracist point of view: they think the scientific or economic consensus is in some way a hoax; that journalists and academics are gatekeepers who enforce a dangerous orthodoxy, often for personal gain or party benefit; and that honest commenters must demonstrate that the Opposition cannot be silenced.
