Don't Feed the Trolls
How online manipulation actually works — and how to recognise it
"Don't feed the trolls" is the most repeated advice on the internet and one of the least examined. It began as guidance for newsrooms about amplification, not as a coping strategy for individuals — and the evidence for it looks very different at those two scales. This site names the tactics, shows how to recognise them, and is honest about when disengaging works and when it does not.
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.
Flamebait
Content posted mainly to provoke angry replies, where the reaction is the point and the topic is incidental.
Rage bait
Outrage-optimised content aimed at the recommendation algorithm rather than at any particular argument.
Shitposting
Deliberately absurd, provocative or offensive posting that degrades a discussion, usually disruptive rather than targeted.
Engagement bait
Posts that ask for an interaction outright — tag someone, comment your birth month, like if you agree — to farm engagement signals.
Necroposting
Reviving a long-dead thread to restart a settled argument in front of people who have moved on.
Derailing
Steering a discussion away from its subject so the original point is never actually addressed.
Pedantry trolling
Using trivial technical corrections to dominate a conversation and imply the substantive point is wrong.
Copypasta flooding
Repeatedly pasting the same block of text to bury a discussion under volume.
Edgelording
Performing transgression for status, calibrated to be shocking enough to react to and deniable enough to defend.
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.
Flaming
Direct hostility aimed at a person rather than an argument, intended to produce an emotional reply.
Ad hominem baiting
Attacking the person so the reply becomes self-defence rather than argument.
Quote-dunking
Requoting someone to your own audience for ridicule, so the reply is performed rather than exchanged.
Tone policing
Rejecting a point because of how it was said, converting the subject into the speaker's manner.
Strawmanning
Refuting a weakened or invented version of the argument instead of the one actually made.
Nut-picking
Presenting the least defensible member of a group as representative of it.
Hypocrisy bait
Provoking an inconsistency so the conversation becomes about your consistency rather than the issue.
Sensitive-topic digression
Introducing a charged subject to make continuing the original discussion socially costly.
The "just joking" defence
Retroactively reframing a provocation as humour, so objecting to it becomes the offence.
Poe's-Law gaming
Performing a position ambiguously enough that sincerity and parody cannot be distinguished, then punishing either reading.
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.
Sealioning
Relentless, superficially polite demands for evidence that exhaust the target while preserving the appearance of good faith.
Just Asking Questions
Advancing a claim entirely through insinuating questions, so nothing is ever asserted and nothing can be rebutted.
Concern trolling
Opposing something while posing as a worried supporter of it, so the objection arrives pre-shielded from challenge.
Whataboutism
Deflecting a criticism by raising a different alleged wrong instead of answering the one raised.
Gish gallop
Burying an opponent under more claims than can be answered in the time available, so unanswered reads as unanswerable.
Moving the goalposts
Raising the standard of evidence each time it is met, so the demand can never be satisfied.
Motte-and-bailey
Advancing a strong contentious claim, then retreating to a modest defensible one when challenged, then returning.
Conversational gaslighting
Denying what was plainly said or done until the other person doubts their own recollection.
DARVO
Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender — a documented response pattern that recasts the accused as the wronged party.
Kafkatrapping
Framing a charge so that denial is treated as proof of it.
Loaded questions
Questions whose presupposition is conceded by any direct answer.
Quote mining
Excerpting accurately but selectively so the quoted person appears to say the opposite of what they said.
Feigned ignorance
Performing not-understanding to make the other party keep re-explaining indefinitely.
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.
Sockpuppetry
One person running multiple accounts to manufacture the appearance of independent agreement.
Meatpuppetry
Recruiting real people to post on your behalf, producing genuine accounts with borrowed motives.
Ban evasion
Returning to a community under a new identity after removal, resetting the moderation record.
Brigading
An organised group arriving from elsewhere to overwhelm a discussion or a person.
Dogpiling
Many people responding to one person at once, where the volume rather than any single message is the harm.
Vote manipulation
Coordinated voting to promote or bury content irrespective of what it says.
Review bombing
Mass negative reviews driven by a grievance unrelated to the thing being reviewed.
Mass reporting
Coordinated abuse reports used to trigger automated enforcement against a target.
Astroturfing
Manufacturing the appearance of grassroots support for an organised or commercial interest.
Crowdturfing
Astroturfing bought at scale through paid-crowd marketplaces rather than run in-house.
Impersonation
Posing as a specific person or organisation to borrow or damage their credibility.
Infiltration
Building a long-running trusted persona inside a community before using the trust it earned.
Raiding
A coordinated influx into a live space — a stream, server or chat — to overwhelm it in real time.
Griefing
Playing a shared space to ruin it for others rather than to win at it.
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.
Troll farms
Paid, staffed operations producing provocation and division as a job rather than a pastime.
Coordinated inauthentic behaviour
The platform-policy term for coordinated activity relying on fake accounts to mislead about who is behind it.
Firehose of falsehood
High-volume, multi-channel, unashamedly inconsistent messaging that overwhelms rather than persuades.
Flooding the zone
Saturating attention with so much material that sustained focus on any one thing becomes impossible.
Hashtag hijacking
Capturing someone else's tag or trend to redirect the audience it gathered.
False-flag trolling
Posing as your opponents while behaving badly, so the discredit lands on them.
Wedge-issue exploitation
Amplifying an existing division from both sides at once, where widening the gap is the objective.
Data-void exploitation
Seeding content for search terms that have no authoritative results yet, so the first answer is yours.
Information laundering
Moving a claim through progressively more reputable venues until its origin is no longer visible.
Hate raids
Automated, repeated abusive floods against a specific creator, usually in live chat.
Amplification botting
Automated accounts inflating engagement to make a position look more widely held than it is.
Persona-building
Investing months in a credible account with no apparent agenda, so its later turn carries weight.
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 most repeated advice on the internet, and among the least examined.
- The grey rock method — Responding in a deliberately neutral, minimal and emotionally flat way, so that provoking you stops producing anything worth having.