Fighting Back Against the Comment Section Trolls
My interview with Tomáš Halász, founder of Troll Wall
This is the first in a series of interviews I’m doing with leaders in the technology driving Modern Political Campaigns. I spoke with Tomáš Halász earlier this month about his non-traditional career to founding Troll Wall, a platform that uses AI for moderating hateful comments on social media platforms. This is a problem that has been increasing since major platforms like Meta and X have pulled back from aggressive moderation.
Tomáš Halász didn’t set out to be a political technologist but COVID happened, he lost his job as an award-winning photo journalist, and it led him to engage public discourse more directly in his home country of Slovakia. Then he became a social media counterrevolutionary, founding a platform to help defend political parties, NGOs, and big brands from aggressive hate online and bots. This is a story of someone seeing something they knew was wrong, and doing something tangible about it.
I met Tomáš through Josef Lentch, who I didn’t meet until it was too late to attend his Political Tech Summit. In a future post, I’ll cover my conversation with him. I met Josef through Sebastián Rodriguez, who found me through the first edition of Modern Political Campaigns and had me on his podcast during the rollout in 2021.
Sebastián has become a friend, and when I got appointed by NYU to teach their domestic and international political campaigns course, he was my first call. Pro tip: asking people you respect the question, “who do you think is doing the most interesting work in this space?” always leads to great connections.
Two steps removed from Sebastián, Tomáš was a revelation. He saw very clearly the need for candidates, political parties, and virtually everyone with a reputational stake online to have a tool to manage the flood of misinformation, negativity, and brand-killing comments that trash social media pages and decided to create countermeasures. Not being a techie, he created a team and built it for politicos first, then non-combatants. While the rest of us were lamenting the white flags from our favorite platforms, Tomáš got to work.
In addition to my questions, Tomáš also gave a presentation of the technology, which I found both straightforward and interesting. In the era of the Modern Political Campaign, The Troll Wall team are helping busy social media managers cut through the noise and defend their principals against the worst of the internet: the comment section.