Frustrating as they may be, every journalist wonders at some point about the identity of his or her most devoted online hecklers, but The Climate Desk’s James West and Tim McDonnell just couldn’t let it go.
Citing research that found that “uncivil discourse” in social media and comments sections can have a polarizing affect on consumers of science news, and “sick to death of ignoring him,” the two reporters recently tracked down their “most pernicious Twitter troll,” @hoytc55, who had mentioned @climatedesk 126 times in April alone, almost as much as the site’s top nine other followers combined.
The man behind the curtain turned out to be Hoyt Connell, a 57-year-old insurance executive who likes to refer to climate science as “alarmist propaganda.” West and McDonnell met him at his home, and their interview forms the first installment of a three-part video series that The Climate Desk published on Monday. Unfortunately, it doesn’t shine as much light under the bridge as it could have.
“Why climate science out of all the different topics you could talk about? Why this one? Why us?” West asks while explaining their curiosity in front of a dash-cam on the way to Connell’s house. They’re great questions that ultimately go unanswered.
The first thing West noticed upon arrival, he says in a voiceover, was that Hoyt is “really normal,” and he points out his argyle sweater and diamond-toed socks, his love of cats, and his avuncular quality. What the viewer really wants to know is what that normalcy belies, but the interview doesn’t go much deeper.
“I think what’s sad is when people sit on the sidelines,” Connell says in his first quote. “When I lock onto something, I generally don’t let go.”
Why is that? West points out that Connell is a “social media junkie,” but the answer, seemingly, doesn’t come until a minute later, when Connell reveals that he’s a prostate cancer survivor and that while he was sick, he learned everything there was to know about his disease.
Following that, West pivots to a great question about why, after thorough reviews of the literature, Connell decided to trust his medical doctors, but not climate scientists. But it’s one that could’ve waited a beat while West worked up to it with a question or two about Connell’s Internet research habits and why he latched onto The Climate Desk in particular.
Regardless, Connell responds with a trite statement about climate change being an unproven theory that has been “usurped by politics” and a jab at Congressman Henry Waxman, whom he accuses of not having done his “homework.”
West gets Connell to concede that he distrusts Waxman largely because he’s a Democrat, which is interesting, but the conversation, and the video, don’t go much farther than that. As the clip fast-forwards through what looks like a long interview, the viewer hears only another voiceover from West.
“And, so, around and around we go,” he says, “and here’s what I learned: Trolls are definitely stubborn and irrational. But I have to say that what struck me the most is that Hoyt is not some outlier, some self-defined troll easily dismissed. In fact, Hoyt should be deeply familiar to anybody who spends any time on the Internet - his catalogued talking points, his love the echo chamber. He’d hate this analysis, but Hoyt struck me as a product, and a purveyor, of America’s antagonistic political culture, and like any propagandist, Hoyt believes that the truth is only in the telling.”
There, the video cuts to a final word from Connell, who says, “If you allow somebody to make a comment and there’s no response, then they’re controlling the definition of the statement. Then it can become a truth.”
It’s a comment that merits a couple of questions about the blurry line between accuracy and rhetoric in cyberspace, but like the others, it goes unexplored.
In the second part of the video series, West interviews an online acolyte, Rosi Reed, a 34-year-old nuclear physicist at Yale University whom he and McDonnell dub the “troll slayer” for her attempts to rebut folks like Connell. It’s not terribly revealing, however.
Nice review. Some outstanding points/references and some very inaccurate points in your review. James West and Tim McDonnell are world class guys and did a great job! To answer one of your references, there actually was a specific motivation to my interest in the global warming propaganda effort. When someone tries to sell my kids in school with very questionable data, then they are going to be called to task to provide all angles to what is clearly an unproven theory. As parents, we have a fiduciary responsibility to preserve the integrity of our education process.
Thanks.
#1 Posted by Hoyt, CJR on Tue 21 May 2013 at 09:14 AM
I know what you mean. I used to follow the heliocentric model until I started researching the controversy. And then I found out it was the evolutionists who were ploting to convince us all of their 'round earth' theory - which is just a bunch of bunk. Next they'll be trying to tell our water is made of hydrogen and oxygen - hello, they're both gases guys! How do two gasses mixed together make a liquid, huh?
You can't trust these guys.
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 21 May 2013 at 12:11 PM
Very funny. They are concerned about “uncivil discourse” so they refer to someone who disagrees with them as a "troll" and a "denier".
#3 Posted by James, CJR on Tue 21 May 2013 at 01:01 PM
He is obviously in what the Yale/GMU Six Americas Survey would call the "6th, Dismissive" category. In the US they generally represent less than 10% of the population, a only a small percentage are outspoken... continuously and loudly sometimes as we see here.
#4 Posted by Joe, CJR on Tue 21 May 2013 at 06:15 PM
Hi Curtis,
Sounds like you want a take down of this man, but I found this report entertaining and illuminating by being relatively fair about the premise and letting the sources speak for themselves. That's journalism art at its finest.
#5 Posted by A little too harsh, maybe?, CJR on Tue 21 May 2013 at 11:09 PM
A little too harsh, actually, I wasn't looking for a takedown at all. Any effort to argue about climate science itself would have been fruitless, surely. What I was looking for was more insight into Hoyt's character. How did he get into social media? Why does he find the online world so captivating (as opposed to other forms of public engagement)? Why did he fixate on climate science? Why did he fixate on The Climate Desk? There are hints at answers to these questions in the series, and I would've liked to hear them discussed at greater length.
#6 Posted by Curtis Brainard, CJR on Wed 22 May 2013 at 09:29 AM
I guess I'd like to know what makes the man a "troll." I can tell from the article that he's a stubborn and persistent critic, but if the designation as a troll is based on something more than just that, it would seem worth mentioning. The fact that he uses the term "alarmist propaganda" doesn't seem any more uncivil or polarizing than Brainard calling him a troll, for instance.
How was he tracked down? Does CJR intend to do this for all of its critics?
#7 Posted by Tom T., CJR on Wed 22 May 2013 at 01:47 PM
If your perspective is impervious to evidence and rationality; if you cite things like the cherry picked, stolen emails as evidence of some conspiracy to defraud the whole world muhhaha; if you use talking points from Watts Up With That and the fossil industrial powers that be (and their hydra headed sponsored pr organizations); if you are arguing against science because of the policy implications (the abrupt change required to maintain a habitat suitable for human civilization/survival) and not the science; if you are parsing and testing the claims of the scientific professionals (who have a 97% consensus on this issue) and not submitting the claims of skeptics like Christopher Monkton to the same scrutiny then you just may be an internet troll - just like climate denialist Hoyt above.
It's not the persistence that makes the troll, it's the commitment to a narrative regardless of its foundation which makes the troll.
Hoyt doesn't want to change the world based on a theory. We have satilite a which circulate the world and synch their time based on Einstein's 'theory'.
The assumptions of climate change theory are being realized (ocean acidification, melting poles and glaciers, species migrations, climatic instability and 100 year event crisises becoming normalized, coral collapse, etc...) and will continue to get much worse over time. The value in a theory is in its predictive power and climate change theory has achieved that within a complex system in which sun output, ocean behavior, and volcanic activity vary.
We are changing the climate. We can measure the change chemically and in the amount of energy escaping from the earth's atmosphere via those satellites previously mentioned. If you don't want to believe because you like your fossil fueled life, good on you.
Just be aware that you are condemning the lives of the next generation to live on a hellish once paradise, you thoughtless SOB's.
#8 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 22 May 2013 at 02:34 PM
I just tell people that climate change is a conspiracy by polar bears and icebergs. Let's get someone to sell Connell some ocean-front property, then his great grand-children can tell him by Oui-Ja Board whether he was right or not.
#9 Posted by Andrew Porter, CJR on Fri 24 May 2013 at 11:37 PM