"Obama sucks." When Barack Obama relaunched Whitehouse.gov in January, a cry went up from his supporters. Obama had promised to take the democratized, wikified mojo of his campaign Web site-with its open-to-all discussion threads-to Pennsylvania Avenue. But when the Whitehouse.gov blog went live with no way for the public to post comments on it, critics began carping. The challengernObama faces in allowing conversation at the digital White House is obvious: trolls. Discussion-thread veterans will tell you that politics attracts more vicious, raging, insult-hurling trolls than almost any other topic. So how can Obama truly liberate the White House site without having it go irretrievably toxic? How could we actually have a nationwide political discussion area? By tapping into new techniques for troll taming. The world's top discussion moderators have developed successful tools for keeping online miscreants from disrupting conversation. All are rooted in one psychological insight: If you simply ban trolls-kicking them off your board-you nurture their curdled sense of being an oppressed truth-speaker. Instead, the moderators rely on making the comments less prominent.
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