Content posted mainly to provoke angry replies, where the reaction is the point and the topic is incidental.
Bait
Don't Feed the Trolls
How online manipulation actually works — and how to recognise it
"Don't feed the trolls" is the advice this site is named after, and it does not simply endorse it. It does one job for an account with an audience, where it is an argument about amplification, and a different job for one person being targeted; this site's view is that the case for it is much weaker in the second than in the first. This site names the tactics, shows how to recognise them, and is honest about when disengaging works and when it does not.
What does "don't feed the trolls" mean?
As this site uses the phrase, "don't feed the trolls" is internet advice to not reply to someone who is deliberately trying to provoke you online, so that they get no reaction; Australia's eSafety Commissioner gives the advice as "don't feed the trolls" and says responding is likely to make things worse[1], and defines trolling as posting or commenting online to deliberately upset others[2].
This site's reading is that the evidence for it is less settled than the slogan suggests, and the page on the advice covers what is and is not known about where the phrase comes from, whether it works, and when it does not apply. Read the full answer, with sources →
Four things a tactic can be doing
- Bait
Provocation aimed at producing a reaction. The content is instrumental — it exists to be replied to, and the reply is the payoff.
- Rhetorical
Arguments that are shaped to be unwinnable rather than to be right. The form of debate is preserved while its purpose — finding out who is correct — is quietly discarded.
- Identity & coordination
Manipulating who appears to be speaking: multiple accounts, borrowed identities, or manufactured crowds. The claim being made is not in the text but in the apparent number of independent people making it.
- Amplification
Manipulating how far something travels — flooding, hijacking, gaming ranking and reporting systems. The target is the distribution mechanism rather than any individual reader.
The tactic table
58 named tactics, plus 4 red lines that are a different category of act and are listed separately below. These are terms people already use, not labels coined here — and where this site supplies the definition rather than a dictionary or a named authority, the page says so at the top. Rows are ordered by how much disengaging alone achieves.
Light / opportunistic
9 tacticsLow-effort provocation aimed at a reaction rather than at a person. Often untargeted, often bored rather than malicious, and usually indistinguishable from ordinary rudeness in any single message.
Response: Disengagement works here and is almost always the whole answer. This is the band the folk advice was built for.
Outrage-optimised content aimed at the recommendation algorithm rather than at any particular argument.
Bait
Deliberately absurd, provocative or offensive posting that degrades a discussion, usually disruptive rather than targeted.
Bait
Reviving a long-dead thread to restart a settled argument in front of people who have moved on.
Bait
Performing transgression for status, calibrated to be shocking enough to react to and deniable enough to defend.
Bait
Steering a discussion away from its subject so the original point is never actually addressed.
Rhetorical
Using trivial technical corrections to dominate a conversation and imply the substantive point is wrong.
Rhetorical
Posts that ask for an interaction outright — tag someone, comment your birth month, like if you agree — to farm engagement signals.
Amplification
Repeatedly pasting the same block of text to bury a discussion under volume.
Amplification
Classic reactive
10 tacticsInflammatory content designed to produce an emotional reply from a specific person or group. The provocation is the point; the topic is a vehicle.
Response: Disengagement still usually works, but the pull to answer is much stronger because the bait is now personal. This is where knowing the pattern by name does most of its work.
Direct hostility aimed at a person rather than an argument, intended to produce an emotional reply.
Bait
Retroactively reframing a provocation as humour, so objecting to it becomes the offence.
Bait
Performing a position ambiguously enough that sincerity and parody cannot be distinguished, then punishing either reading.
Bait
Attacking the person so the reply becomes self-defence rather than argument.
Rhetorical
Rejecting a point because of how it was said, converting the subject into the speaker's manner.
Rhetorical
Refuting a weakened or invented version of the argument instead of the one actually made.
Rhetorical
Presenting the least defensible member of a group as representative of it.
Rhetorical
Provoking an inconsistency so the conversation becomes about your consistency rather than the issue.
Rhetorical
Introducing a charged subject to make continuing the original discussion socially costly.
Rhetorical
Requoting someone to your own audience for ridicule, so the reply is performed rather than exchanged.
Amplification
Sophisticated / covert
13 tacticsBad faith wearing the costume of good faith — the endless sincere question, the worried ally, the debate that resets every time you answer it. Hardest to name, because each individual message looks reasonable.
Response: Recognition matters more than response. The tell is the pattern across a conversation, never any single message, and the honest advice is to judge the exchange rather than the sentence.
Relentless, superficially polite demands for evidence that exhaust the target while preserving the appearance of good faith.
Rhetorical
Advancing a claim entirely through insinuating questions, so nothing is ever asserted and nothing can be rebutted.
Rhetorical
Opposing something while posing as a worried supporter of it, so the objection arrives pre-shielded from challenge.
Rhetorical
Deflecting a criticism by raising a different alleged wrong instead of answering the one raised.
Rhetorical
Burying an opponent under more claims than can be answered in the time available, so unanswered reads as unanswerable.
Rhetorical
Raising the standard of evidence each time it is met, so the demand can never be satisfied.
Rhetorical
Advancing a strong contentious claim, then retreating to a modest defensible one when challenged, then returning.
Rhetorical
Denying what was plainly said or done until the other person doubts their own recollection.
Rhetorical
Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender — a documented response pattern that recasts the accused as the wronged party.
Rhetorical
Framing a charge so that denial is treated as proof of it.
Rhetorical
Questions whose presupposition is conceded by any direct answer.
Rhetorical
Excerpting accurately but selectively so the quoted person appears to say the opposite of what they said.
Rhetorical
Performing not-understanding to make the other party keep re-explaining indefinitely.
Rhetorical
Coordinated / multi-account
14 tacticsSeveral accounts — run by one person, a small group, or a loose crowd — producing the appearance of independent agreement. Manufactured consensus is the product; volume is the weapon.
Response: Disengaging no longer ends it, because you were never the audience. This is where documentation, platform reporting and support become the real moves, and where "just ignore it" starts doing harm as advice.
Playing a shared space to ruin it for others rather than to win at it.
Bait
One person running multiple accounts to manufacture the appearance of independent agreement.
Identity & coordination
Recruiting real people to post on your behalf, producing genuine accounts with borrowed motives.
Identity & coordination
Returning to a community under a new identity after removal, resetting the moderation record.
Identity & coordination
Manufacturing the appearance of grassroots support for an organised or commercial interest.
Identity & coordination
Astroturfing bought at scale through paid-crowd marketplaces rather than run in-house.
Identity & coordination
Posing as a specific person or organisation to borrow or damage their credibility.
Identity & coordination
Building a long-running trusted persona inside a community before using the trust it earned.
Identity & coordination
An organised group arriving from elsewhere to overwhelm a discussion or a person.
Amplification
Many people responding to one person at once, where the volume rather than any single message is the harm.
Amplification
Coordinated voting to promote or bury content irrespective of what it says.
Amplification
Mass negative reviews driven by a grievance unrelated to the thing being reviewed.
Amplification
Coordinated abuse reports used to trigger automated enforcement against a target.
Amplification
A coordinated influx into a live space — a stream, server or chat — to overwhelm it in real time.
Amplification
Ideological / campaign
12 tacticsOrganised, resourced and strategic — sometimes commercial, sometimes state-linked — blending provocation with disinformation to shift what looks normal rather than to win any particular argument.
Response: Individual response is close to irrelevant at this scale. Understanding is the point: the useful reader here is a moderator, journalist or researcher.
Paid, staffed operations producing provocation and division as a job rather than a pastime.
Identity & coordination
Coordinated inauthentic behaviour
The platform-policy term for coordinated activity relying on fake accounts to mislead about who is behind it.
Identity & coordination
Posing as your opponents while behaving badly, so the discredit lands on them.
Identity & coordination
Investing months in a credible account with no apparent agenda, so its later turn carries weight.
Identity & coordination
High-volume, multi-channel, unashamedly inconsistent messaging that overwhelms rather than persuades.
Amplification
Saturating attention with so much material that sustained focus on any one thing becomes impossible.
Amplification
Capturing someone else's tag or trend to redirect the audience it gathered.
Amplification
Amplifying an existing division from both sides at once, where widening the gap is the objective.
Amplification
Seeding content for search terms that have no authoritative results yet, so the first answer is yours.
Amplification
Moving a claim through progressively more reputable venues until its origin is no longer visible.
Amplification
Automated, repeated abusive floods against a specific creator, usually in live chat.
Amplification
Automated accounts inflating engagement to make a position look more widely held than it is.
Amplification
These are not trolling
Stalking, doxxing, swatting and organised harassment campaigns are a different category of act, not the far end of the same spectrum. Nothing above is written for them, and applying it can make things worse.
- Doxxing — Publishing private identifying information to expose someone to real-world harm.
- Swatting — Provoking an armed emergency response to someone's home through a false report.
- Cyberstalking — Sustained monitoring and pursuit of a specific person across platforms and into their offline life.
- Harassment campaigns — Organised, prolonged targeting of an individual, where the objective is to drive them out entirely.
Why it works
- How conversations turn toxic — A discussion going bad is treated as something the conversation does over time, rather than as a property of any single comment in it.
- Why people troll — Two very different explanations — stable personality traits, and ordinary people in bad circumstances — and the evidence supports both.
Responding
- Counter-speech — Replying in public so that onlookers see a claim answered, rather than to persuade the person who made it — a narrower and rarer case than most advice about replying implies.
- Keeping a record — Writing down what happened, when it happened and who saw it — a practice borrowed from guidance about stalking and harassment, not tested for the ordinary tactics documented elsewhere on this site.
- Don't feed the trolls — Declining to reply, so that provocation produces no reaction and no audience. The advice this site is named after, and one it does not simply endorse.
- The grey rock method — Responding in a deliberately neutral, minimal and emotionally flat way, so that provoking you stops producing anything worth having.
Sources
Last checked . Each quote below is verified against an archived copy of its source every time the site is built.
- [1] Trolling - what it is and what to do about it, eSafety Commissioner (Australia) [archived]
“don't feed the trolls - responding is likely to make things worse. report the abuse instead”
- [2] Trolling - what it is and what to do about it, eSafety Commissioner (Australia) [archived]
“trolling is when someone posts or comments online to deliberately upset others”