It was the kind of story that was almost guaranteed to bring out the internet trolls.

On April 15, Margaret Trudeau, wife of the late prime minister and mother of the current Liberal leader, was interviewed by CBC Radio's Ottawa Morning. She was promoting her new memoir, The Time of Your Life, but she also took the opportunity to opine on the current state of federal politics in the run-up to the coming election.

"I'm not looking forward to the attack ads," she told host Robyn Bresnahan. "I think it's straight out bullying, and I'm ashamed of Canadians for doing this."

Although she didn't mention the Conservatives by name, it was clear she was referring to the negative ads targeting her son that the governing party has been running ever since Justin Trudeau became Liberal leader.

And when his mother's opinions appeared online in an article published on cbc.ca, readers were ready to rumble. Within 24 hours, the story had attracted 2,698 comments.

The number of comments is not surprising considering that the people involved — Margaret and Justin Trudeau, and the current prime minister, Stephen Harper — are all polarizing figures who attract very loyal and vocal supporters, and detractors.

According to Wikipedia: "In internet slang, a troll is a person who sows discord on the internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.

Nor was the nasty and combative tone of the comments surprising, because that's what we have come to expect from the partisans who troll the web looking to pounce at every opportunity.

"Will Mommy be participating in the debates to make sure those big meanies don't say anything bad to Wonderboy?" asked LarryRight, in one of his several comments about the article.

"Economy is in the toilet. Senators on trial. Deficit after deficit. But yup Justin is the problem lol," responded Skippy, who then went on to observe, "it's unfortunate that paid Conservative Posters are so nasty."

That prompted someone called Drydocked to ask "who are these "paid conservative posters" you speak of?"

In fact, there is no evidence that Canadian political parties pay anyone to attack their opponents online and disrupt comment threads on popular websites.

Why waste their money when there appears to be no shortage of rabid party activists eager to engage the enemy for free?

Age of empowerment?

There was a time, not so long ago, when it appeared that the web would truly transform and bring out the best in modern politics.

Joe Trippi, who ran Vermont governor Howard Dean's pioneering web-centred campaign for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, wrote in his campaign memoir that the internet would re-energize democracy, empowering citizens as never before.

"We are, right now, in the midst of sweeping aside shallow, cynical broadcast politics for the politics of ideas and issues that will define the internet age," he wrote.

If only.

A decade after the Dean campaign, politics as conducted on the web and social media seems as nasty, brutish and cynically shallow as it was in the bad old pre-web days.

Online has also become an indispensable ingredient of the modern campaign, but it is a blood sport that more often than not repels those who enter in the hope of engaging their fellow citizens in ideas and issues.

Indeed, waging full-scale online wars of misinformation and disruption has become a core mission for many governments and political activists.

Information armies

At the head of the class stands Vladimir Putin. The Russian government pays hundreds of bloggers to write for Russian internet forums and social networks and the comments sections of Western publications, according to a spate of stories recently in certain Russian media and the Western press.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's government pays hundreds of people known as its "troll army" to write in the comments sections of Western publications, according to reports. (Mikhail Klimentyev/RIA Novosti/Kremlin/Reuters) Reported to be working 24/7 out of a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, the output of Putin's "troll army" has increased dramatically since the onset of the crisis in the Ukraine last year.

Its online responders have flooded domestic and foreign sites with stories about the evil Ukrainian government and Putin's brave response.

You can see their handiwork in the comments section of your favourite news site whenever there is a story critical of Russian policy in the Ukraine.

In response, earlier this year, the government in Kyiv established its own 20,000-strong volunteer "information army" to create social media accounts by people posing as residents of eastern Ukraine.

It's a bit late to the party. According to files leaked by Edward Snowden, both the British and American spy agencies have been actively involved in facilitating online disruption and deception, as are governments in India, China, Israel and elsewhere.

The nasty effect

Very little of this online trolling involves high-minded discussions of issues and ideas.

Many of us would like to think that negative comments, like negative political ads, simply don't work.

But several studies have shown that they do; that the best way to discredit your opponent's argument is to make your attack as nasty and as personal as possible.

One study, published in 2013, presented readers with an article regarding the risks of a new technology.

They were then asked to read two sets of comments about the article. One set of comments was civil, the other quite rude (as in, you'd have to be "an idiot" to support this technology).

The readers' perceptions of the article's quality were unchanged among those who read the civil comments, but they declined dramatically among those who read the rude comments. The authors called it the "nasty effect."

Promise broken

None of this augurs well for the upcoming federal election. Our own partisan troll armies, whether they be volunteers or paid, will be out in full force, attempting to cause as much digital disruption as they can by attacking each other and using language that would make a schoolyard bully blush.

Margaret Trudeau said she is "not looking forward to the attack ads" on son Justin, as he runs to be Canada's next prime minister. (Blair Gable/Reuters)

That might well turn off many potential voters who thought the web would provide more light than heat.

"Power is shifting to the people," Joe Trippi wrote, "There's a massive shift not just in how we communicate, but in who has the power to communicate."

Sadly, that power to communicate now appears to have been usurped by the trolls.

They've turned politics online into something as nasty and as fake as professional wrestling, and the rest of us into spectators.