Lee Raine

July 2018 marks the fifth anniversary of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, which was first coined following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. In the course of those five years, #BlackLivesMatter has become an archetypal example of modern protests and political engagement on social media: A new Pew Research Center analysis of public tweets finds the hashtag has been used nearly 30 million times on Twitter – an average of 17,002 times per day – as of May 1, 2018.

To illuminate current attitudes about the potential impacts of online social interaction over the next decade, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center conducted a large-scale canvassing of technology experts, scholars, corporate practitioners and government leaders. Four major themes emerged from their responses:

Things will stay bad because to troll is human; anonymity abets anti-social behavior; inequities drive at least some inflammatory dialogue; and the growing scale and complexity of internet discourse makes this difficult to defeat.
Things will stay bad because tangible and intangible economic and political incentives support trolling. Participation = power and profits.
Things will get better because technical and human solutions will arise as the online world splinters into segmented, controlled social zones with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).
Oversight and community moderation come with a cost. Some solutions could further change the nature of the internet because surveillance will rise; the state may regulate discourse; and these changes will polarize people and limit access to information and free speech.