Rosemary McLeod: Trolls need to be dragged into the sunlight

Bring the trolls into the light. Photo/Getty Images

There are good reasons why I dislike TV shows where people – okay, they volunteer - are insulted, made to look dorkish, or both.

I mean, first off, the Act Party's David Seymour here, twerking on Dancing with the Stars.

In his weird little Lycra playsuit, sticking his butt out, he looked uncannily like the phantom defecator of Queensland, caught in the act recently in the same posture while fouling a private Brisbane pathway for the umpteenth time.

The poo jogger turned out to be a 64-year-old executive linked to a retirement village and investment group, just the sort of voter who'd be likely to vote for Seymour, I imagine.

Andrew MacIntosh would have easy access to adult disposable nappies by the tonne, but Libertarians, with whom I equate Act, are into freedom in all things while giving the finger to anyone who isn't.

Such a philosophy echoes that of the dog I saw this week taking a dump in the centre of the lawn at Wellington's War Memorial Park. The dog was delighted with itself and ran around in circles while its owner sucked on a durry and made no effort to clean up. Why would he?

There are many political parallels one could draw, too obvious to detail. Their business done, they strolled off, man and dog in united libertarian virtue.

Meanwhile, Matilda Rice, a past winner of The Bachelor NZ, has declared she felt like "absolute shit", poo being quite the antipodean thing just now.

Rice is co-host of Heartbreak Island, a TV programme that heartlessly dumps a selected group of young people aged 16 to 20 in Fiji to compete for popularity and temporary true love, a bit like Tinder, I guess, but of longer duration and therefore greater capacity to hurt. Hence the entertainment.

Rice broke the bad news to the rejects of the first week, Ella and Tavita, who received no votes from any of the other 14 contestants. Ella bravely resisted the obvious temptation to compare herself with poo, saying, "I one hundred per cent feel like I want to cry." She is obviously too real for a reality show.

A viewer took issue with scheduling the show at a time when children, who are often insecure about their popularity, would be watching, and the response from the broadcaster was hardly reassuring. The first pairings, "reflected the realities of dating in a Tinder age", was the cold reply.

If it's grim you want, look no further. Placing young people in pairs in a strange place and exploiting their insecurities is pretty sadistic by anyone's standards, not to mention the undeclared subtext of which of them will have sex with which. If this is what it's like in the Tinder age I fear for anyone who buys into its cruelty and fickleness.

You enter social media on pain of madness. As an example, Kylie Jenner, 20 and a Kardashian, has deleted almost all images of her baby daughter, Stormi, after trolls said the child was ugly, and made kidnap threats.

It's a shame trolls can't be dragged into sunlight, but that's their thing, insulting strangers under pseudonyms while lurking in the shadows. Sociopaths have never had it so good, which is why when Rice's fiancée sprang to her defence this week he looked to have a reality problem of his own.

"I don't think negativity and hurtful comment have a place on social media," he wrote, rather like Admiral Horatio Nelson famously holding a telescope to his blind eye and saying: "I see no foe."

There's a foe there alright, a nasty one, and it's staring straight back at us.