Anyone who has been in enough face-to-face debates with other people understand just how difficult it is to convince another person of their point of view, let alone to seem as the ‘winner’ by whichever audience is watching, be it a group of coworkers who have gathered around or a bunch of guys at a bar. People who debate often enough do their best to generally avoid drawing onlookers into the debate – unless they know that the person they are drawing in supports their viewpoint. 

The opposition will suddenly find it much harder as now they aren't just arguing with one emotionally charged person who could make argumentative mistakes and slip-ups which could be capitalized on, but two people. Each added person adds more brainpower that both allows for each ally to cover for the mistakes of the other as well as a combined, deeper well of counterarguments. Also, the more people on a side makes it seem to onlookers that there is a general consensus that more people agree with that side. 

Thus we come to the dangers of public opinion on the internet, where a very small few – far smaller than has ever been historically possible has not just damaged public perception of the majority by being able to have multiple accounts – from which they can inhabit both positions in a debate by pretending to be two people – but also because they can buy ten thousand ‘bots’ or fake accounts which can then upvote whatever opinion or narrative that they which to push onto the public. 

Recently I wrote about how the Thales Group estimated that at a minimum, 32% of -all- internet traffic is from bad, or ‘malicious bot’ accounts. Averaging that out among the whole internet, means that every third meme or post, upvote or downvote is created by a very small subset of people wishing to sway public opinion – or even public fact. This number is far scarier when you don’t average it; why would a bad guy do that?

There are online forums for things like knitting and mapmaking among many tens of thousands of other such groups. There would be no reason to spread fake accounts to move the needle of public opinion in those groups – which means that if we took what a whole third of all internet traffic looked like and shoved it down to only the political spaces… while also considering that porn consumption is at an all time high, and that too is internet traffic, the conclusion is that nearly every political image reshared by your friends or on the front page of Reddit was planted somewhere along the line by a rival government, your own government, or very few trolls whose believe they are a crusader for the very left or right which has been infiltrated by fake debaters and champions. 

I have come to wonder of late if it is not just the “people" of the United States who spend dozens of hours doomscrolling online and have had their opinions shifted into the dark, but what if it is also our own politicians, who are drinking the juice of other nations and regurgitating it, unknowingly? If both people who I speak to on the right or left have delusions of a civil war, while also acting cordial and polite in coffee shops to each other and while they walk down the sidewalk or even pick their kids up from daycare – could not also our politicians be just as deluded? 

The thought came to me then, about how some years ago people spoke about an online ID, to verify that you were indeed a real person with a real opinion: that in both the spirit of honesty AND free speech that the Internet should also become physically divided. It would be done in such a way in which this…. ugly monster where free, anonymous speech is allowed to remain, even if it means free speech is only a thousand times more free, anonymous  and opinionated for a very few people with bot farms then the rest of us. On the other side, on every new website your own name would be attached to your self, just like at a public forum, however there would also be no upvotes or downvotes on anything – allowing people who read opinions to generate their own opinions about what they read without any social pressure from some odd-twenty-thousand-fake upvotes. 

A physically divided internet with no overlap would bring us back closer to true dialogue and debate, rather than whatever monster exists right now. To imagine that the politically and radical right or left would be half as bad as either have been in the last fifteen years without the current internet would be folly. Making a second internet where all users are verified is a top-down fix to the problem. As a bottom-up solution I’d honestly like to see public forums and debate clubs make a comeback. 

Elsewise: for how much longer will we leave the power of public opinion in the hands of others?

Austin Petak is an aspiring novelist and freelance journalist who loves seeking stories and the quiet passions of the soul. If you are interested in reaching out to him to cover a story, you may find him at austinpetak@gmail.com.