Trolls

Aesop, Grimm, Tolkien, Rowling and countless other writers have portrayed the ageless troll. Cute and diminutive to ugly and giant, no matter the demeanor, always entertaining.

Our modern trolls on the other hand, are anything but entertaining. They don't have pink fuzzy hair and sit on the end of a pencil or ten feet tall with stone faces living in caves. They look just like you and me on the outside. On the inside they are filled with a poison that leaves a vitriolic poop trail all through the internet. These trolls live in cyberspace, a world that we spend more and more time in. There are mercenary trolls paid by corporations and governments to sow seeds of misinformation, discredit or frighten those who voice an opinion that is not liked or threatens to reveal something. Then there is the garden variety troll that just likes to walk through your little corner of the cyber world and wipe their ass all over your thoughts. They're not interested in constructive dialogue, they just want to smear shit on the wall.

These garden trolls are irrelevant in the long run. They're petty little slugs that slither back under their rocks when confronted. They are a nuisance and frustrating, in a forum like this blog they can be stopped at the gate through comment moderation. But throughout most social media you are vulnerable to attack.

I just recently had an experience with an intellectually challenged douchebag relieving himself on my Facebook Homepage. The maggot himself is of no interest to me. What is of interest to me are the actions of Facebook. Clearly the maggot initiated a complaint about my post that he didn't like and for which he unleashed a foul mouth incoherent rant about. At some point within a forty-eight hour period Facebook came through the back door and removed the post and all evidence it ever existed, scrubbing clean with exact precision my activity logs. They did this without ever notifying me of their intention to act or to ask my opinion. To be clear, they don't have to, it's all over their policies that they don't have to engage with you to remove something from your timeline. Apparently they only require the complaint of one troll to take a draconian action that calls into question the integrity of Facebook as a Company. They claim to foster dialogue and an interaction of opposing views in the hopes of forging better relationships. That is a lovely motto and a blatant lie. The post they removed from my timeline was a meme I shared from another Facebook page. I believe it was removed because the maggot troll was offended by it's truthful statement concerning Christian crimes in the name of God and more importantly wanted his own words of fundementalist intolerance removed before it became a problem for the business he promotes on Facebook. He came to that conclusion when he realized I had no intention of just rolling over and accepting his slime trail.

Facebook is a business and can do whatever it wishes but it operates under a unique premise which requires it's users to believe it actually stands for all the good things it claims to stand for, it doesn't. How many  other users have had posts removed from their timeline and they don't even know it. The actions of Facebook are what is at question here not the maggot troll, whom I have not named in any of my commentaries on this issue, the maggot troll knows who he is. Facebook has displayed an Orwellian foreshadowing in what is nothing more than a clear case of unjustified censorship.

Many will dismiss this missive and that's their right, just as it is my right to speak out and to judge whether or not I wish to be a part of a giant information gathering centipede which cares nothing about the cornerstones of free thought which built the very country they have grown fat and filthy rich in.

I will probably close my Facebook account in the near future, not because of the maggot troll but because of the shadow agents lurking in the background of Facebook algorithms.