It was a few weeks before the 2016 election, and I was putting together a report on the future of online political discourse. We had canvassed thousands of the world's leading experts in technology and culture, and had begun the long task of interpreting the more than 700 responses to the final question in our survey:

In the next decade, will public discourse online become more or less shaped by bad actors, harassment, trolls, and an overall tone of griping, distrust, and disgust?

Despite having studied this space for years, I read agape. It wasn't that the predictions for the coming decade were, as I'd expected, pessimistic. It was their excruciatingly candid, matter-of-fact dystopianism that left the impression. One comment in particular would become downright prescient.

WIRED OPINION ABOUT Jonathan Albright (@d1gi) is the director of the Digital Forensics Initiative at Columbia Journalism School's Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

Kate Crawford, a leading scholar and author who regularly comments on the impact of technology, said “Distrust and trolling is happening at the highest levels of political debate, and the lowest .... The Overton window [the range of acceptable behavior] has been widened considerably by the 2016 US presidential campaign, and not in a good way ... presidential candidates speak of banning Muslims from entering the country [and] retweet neo-Nazis. Trolling is a mainstream form of political discourse.”

Mainstream trolling? Sure, I thought at the time.

Overall, there seemed to be a consensus that civility online was bound to get worse before it got better. Yet there was a sense of hope, that advancements in machine learning and natural language detection might eventually shield us from most of it, like a leveled-up Gandalf riding down the mountain on a white horse.

"To troll is human," one of the bolded takeaways in the Future of the Internet report said. Life went on.

Last year, I joined a research effort led by Lawrence Pintak, that looked at the experiences of more than 80 American Muslims who were running for office in the 2018 midterms. We were eager to understand the prevalence of hate speech, xenophobia, and toxic behavior over the course of their election campaigns. The first report from our study was just published.

Like the experts predicted back in 2016, we did end up heading down the dystopian path. Trolling became a mainstream form, if not the mainstream form of political discourse. Fueled by networked communication technologies, for better and for worse, everyone has a voice. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have democratized participation.

Before getting into the nitty gritty, let's take another step back to an earlier prescience. In early 2008, author and technology critic Douglas Rushkoff gave a keynote address to members of the audience at the Personal Democracy Forum. In his speech, he rallied against what he felt was a fundamental misconception of networked democratic participation: