The Labour Party has had, over the last 10 years at least, teams of people whose purpose it is to populate the media with comments and soundbite opinions which they hope will influence others to the party’s advantage. Of course, this all depends on pretending to be somebody else, with each person also pretending to several other fictitious people. The original team of people was discovered a couple of general elections ago, by this newspaper as it happens, when one of them emailed the other members of the comment-workshop with a proposed ‘letter to the editor’, pretending to be a Sliema resident annoyed at all the building going on (oh, the irony) or something similar, and accidentally copied in one of the editors at The Malta Independent. Overnight, our suspicions were confirmed that all those letters to the editor, suddenly popping up out of nowhere, over names that could have been anybody’s, were manufactured in some political coven.

Then letters to the editor ceased to be important – who reads them anymore? – and the internet took over. The people in the Labour Party workshop suddenly had their work cut out for them. Now it was no longer a matter of writing a short paragraph pretending to be an annoyed housewife from Balzan or a cross businessman from St Julian’s. Now this was serious commitment: Facebook, Twitter, all those news portal comments boards. Several different online personas were created for every individual and they set to work, puffing Labour policy (the party was still in Opposition), commiserating with those who were suffering at the hands of the evil Gonzi government, praising Franco Debono and egging him on, glorifying that other oddball Pullicino Orlando and egging him on, whipping up anger about Arriva (and don’t we look back with nostalgia at the days when a bus was our main problem), dissing government policy, mocking anybody connected with the Nationalist Party, praising Joseph Muscat and generally creating an online feeling of anger and resentment for anything connected with Lawrence Gonzi and the polar opposite for anything connected with Joseph Muscat.

That would have been fine if the sentiments were genuine and coming from real people, but they were not. They were real people all right, but with several fake personas each. And the sentiments were not genuinely meant but manufactured for a public relations purpose. Unfortunately, the number of people who work in the media and spend their time on the internet for professional purposes are relatively few – but we were the ones who could identify these fakes because we saw a pattern emerging. Those who are not professionally involved, who only surf the internet casually, never noticed. What they thought was, gosh, look at all these people who are really, really angry about the buses. My, aren’t a lot of people really, really crazy about Joseph Muscat. They must be on to something.

The Labour Party carried on with this system post the last general election, only now it had its internet-commenters free off the back of the public payroll. While the Treasury paid their wages and salaries, these unofficial, behind-the-scenes internet commenters carried on commenting in favour of Joseph, his ace team, fabulous government policy and the rest of it. If a real person so much as breathed half a word of annoyance about something the government had done which that person did not like, those commenters would be in like a flash, countering it. They also continued to puff up and promote anything Joseph did.

But then something bad happened, something very, very bad. A crisis erupted over the discovery that Joseph’s favourite minister and his chief of staff had set up secret companies in Panama, sheltered by trusts in New Zealand, and that they had been hunting around the shadier jurisdictions of the world to find a bank which would take their business. To make matters even worse, it was revealed that Joseph’s chief of staff had an entire cobweb of offshore companies in Panama, Gibraltar, the British Virgin Islands and Cyprus, and that he shared some of these with the managing director of a very important newspaper publishing group. Chaos erupted and suddenly, lots of people decided that they didn’t like Joseph anymore and that they liked his closest mates even less.

Labour’s dedicated and state-funded internet commenters tried to keep it up for the first few weeks of this crisis, hovering over the news portal comments boards and surging in to tell us that there is nothing illegal in setting up a company in Panama, and that it would be bad only if “money is found”. Those of us who live on the internet saw these twin arguments repeated beneath news report after news report across all portals. Then it became obvious that the indefensible couldn’t be defended, and after a brief respite during which they probably went back to the drawing-board to work out what to do next, they were back. And this time, they’re trolls.

Yes, trolling is the new strategy for the Labour Party’s state-funded internet army. All attempts at persuading people or trying to push forward pro-government arguments have flown out of the window. They have completely given up on that score. Now, what they are doing is sending people in to derail any discussion or debate beneath important stories about government wrong-doing or corruption. This is the way it goes. A news portal publishes a story that reflects badly on the government or people associated with it. The first readers post their comments, expressing their disgust or making some pertinent observation. The Labour trolls swarm in immediately, tackling each commenter with insults or introducing a new topic. Readers become sidetracked and begin focussing on the trolls. The discussion beneath the news story is completely derailed and readers lose sight of what they were discussing, which is the news story that reflects badly on the government.

This tactic began slowly but then became a hurricane, on all news portals. Discussing, on the comments-boards, anything that isn’t great for the government or the Labour Party became impossible. Most of the news portals, bar one, cottoned on relatively quickly and blocked the trolls using the feature available to moderators on the commenting system almost all news portals, and my website, share. The worst of the trolls disappeared from The Malta Independent’s news portal and that of the Times of Malta, though the less aggressive ones, who don’t use bad language and so go undetected, slip through. On my website, they’re banned from the get-go, and do they know it.

A troll, of course, is not somebody who posts a contrary opinion or who disagrees with others. A troll is a commenter whose sole purpose is to derail the discussion and stop or interrupt it, sending it down a different route by provoking people or insulting them to cause an upset. A troll is the equivalent of somebody who walks into a room where people are having a good conversation, and begins hurling bottles about and vomiting over the table so that the conversation stops.

Disqus has now introduced a personal troll-blocking feature which you can use yourself. Where previously you had only ‘flag this comment’, now you also have ‘block this person’. If you click on this, that particular troll will no longer be able to respond to you and you will not see his comments at all (though other people will, unless they block him too). The benefit of this is that when you look at a comments tread that hasn’t been moderated and left open to trolls, you will not see the trolls’ comments and be distracted by them. And that’s a relief for those who don’t wish to be reminded every day that we live on an island replete with medieval villagers.

Good discussions beneath important stories are now driving a lot of site traffic, so it is important – for their own sake – for news portals to keep a close eye on their comments board and weed out anybody who is trying to derail the discussion. There is no point in taking the time to write a good report if the newspaper doesn’t also take the time to do this and allow people to discuss the contents in peace. Though tedious, weeding out trolls is not time wasted. Lively discussions on comments boards are now major attractions for readers. Trolls are there to stop this happening. Get rid of them.

www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com