Maybe the biggest story in 2016 wasn’t the bizarre presidential election. I wonder if historians instead will look back and determine this past year, and this president-elect, really were the manifestation of the moment when our representative democracy flipped from becoming increasingly participatory to anarchistic.

Correction: An earlier version of this report said the New York Times follows the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics. In fact, the newspaper has its own ethics policy. 

Many everyday citizens can’t tell the difference, for example, between information in The New York Times and the so-called Breitbart News Network, with readers of each calling the other “fake news.” But one of those media sources aims to do public good and has its own ethics policy, while the other is a feckless digital incarnate of yellow journalism.

If you are having any trouble whatsoever determining which is which, please stop reading now and enroll in an emergency media literacy course immediately.

During this devolution, some of the most mean-spirited people you can imagine gained unfettered access to keyboards, the internet and masses of people looking to blame others – especially “the media” – for their problems.

Well-meaning journalists, as lovers of the First Amendment, tried using new technologies to increase free speech and civic engagement, offering, for example, opportunities for readers to comment at the end of every article. But instead of attracting dreamy dialectical debate about nuances of the content and its deeper meanings, a deplorable gang of trolls, hucksters, racists, sexists, bullies, xenophobes and propagandists decided to spread out and desecrate all of those spaces with destructive drivel.

A colleague of mine pinged me earlier this month, for example, about a series of comments he spotted on the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s website, related to a story about a killing spree in one of Brazil’s prisons.

This was one of those apocalyptic stories you read about in other countries, happening far away, safely detached from everyday existence on Oahu. Gang members not only were killing each other but taking off heads and other body parts of their victims, including ripping out hearts and intestines.

How might a humane person react to such a story? Well, here is a representative sample of those comments in Hawaii’s largest media source:

• “Dragoninwater” says: “Too bad it doesn’t happen in our prison system. Would save us a ton of tax dollars! Maybe give $20 to each prison guard to go watch a movie at the theater while the inmates have their way in the prison yard? LOL.”
• “A_Reader” says: “Another way to solve prison overcrowding. Not a bad idea.”
• “Lokela” says: “Let them at it. Trim the population. Put up a wall around Brazil.”

Social media can be a similarly scary place, especially for journalists. Lindy West, a columnist for The Guardian, wrote recently about why she gave up Twitter, saying it had been, for the past five years:

To the other extreme, I received an email in the election aftermath raising concerns about Star-Advertiser sports columnist Dave Reardon, who had recirculated an internet meme about Donald Trump on his mixed-use Facebook page. Reardon had posted on Election Day: “Orange is the new black” without elaboration. The email critic, Bob Jones, a former newspaper and television journalist in Hawaii, posted a response on Reardon’s page stating, “Not a suitable comment for a Star-Advertiser staffer” and then wondered what I thought about the situation.

What probably would have been a clear case a decade ago, when journalists everywhere carefully concealed their unpaid opinions from public view, has become much more messy in the social media/reader comments era. Journalists not only are being asked today to create the stories but also to manage the discussions around them and, in their spare time, keep a peppy side discussion going with their audiences.

Reardon’s Facebook page, which typically mixes commentary on sports and pop culture, has plenty of breezy thoughts on it, ranging from personal remembrances to critical commentary to Star-Advertiser story promotions. What did he mean by posting that line? Not much, he said in a recent interview. Just thought it was funny.

Reardon is a newspaper columnist. Writing opinions is his job. While he usually focuses on sports, he sometimes brings politics into his work, especially at the places in which sports and politics overlap, such as during the recent debate about athletes standing (or not) during the national anthem.

“Orange is the new black” could be interpreted in many ways, mostly negative but maybe positive in a snarky way. Reardon said he stands by his posting of the comment, regardless of how it’s interpreted, because his role is to prompt discussion. If he served as a political beat writer, he might feel differently, but, in his current position, he said, “the line between what is news and what is analysis, it’s not clearly marked anymore.”

Those lines eventually will be redrawn, and new boundaries will rise. You can either participate in this massive wall-building or be left outside. In the meantime, journalists (along with democracy itself) will struggle and face intense pressures to recoil from these tensions and avoid the dirty fights. But if we want to keep our freedoms intact – including the basic right to say what we want, when we want, how we want – we have to be willing to read things we’d rather not see and stand up to them in ways that might be awkward and uncomfortable.

In this moment of dire need, now is not the time to turn back to your echo chambers. What we urgently could use now is not more mean tweets, but more clean sweeps through the dark alleys of the internet. If what you find in these places is disagreeable, don’t quickly depart and ignore the dialogues, hoping they will go away. (They won’t). Participate in them. Show other nearby lurkers that someone is willing to stand up to bullies. Someone is willing to say something.

The trolls did their damage. They created the slime of the ecosystem and exploited its slipperiness to slide in their infectious negativity.

But this open and adaptable environment also can be undone and remade, with persistence and dedication. Such an effort will need leaders. It will need people with courage and convictions. It will need you to help wash out the muck. We don’t need to censor or suppress. We don’t need less discourse in our system. We just need more of the constructive and thoughtful kind.