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How to respond

A decision tree for choosing which response strategy matches your situation.

Are you frightened, or has any of this moved offline?

This question comes first because getting it wrong costs the most. If someone is threatening you, turning up, or seems to know where you are, none of the rest of this applies.

Red lines →

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Now, what is the shape of the problem?

Is this one person or several?

Several accounts arriving together is not the case the advice was built for. Neither, it is worth saying, is one person who will not stop: a single fixated individual is the harder case, not the reassuring one.

Are you the audience, or is someone else?

If the point is to perform something for onlookers, your silence does not end the performance.

Is anything being asserted that will stand if unanswered?

A factual claim in front of people who will remember it is different from an insult.

Are you an individual or an institution?

The amplification argument is much stronger for accounts with reach than for someone with two hundred followers.

  • Either answer → Don't feed the trolls, which is about the scales the amplification argument holds at and the ones it does not

What will replying cost you?

This is a legitimate input, not a weakness. Consider your emotional toll, time, and other effects of engaging.

Response strategies

Each strategy works in specific situations and fails in others. Find the one that matches yours.

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.

Works when:
There is a real audience beyond the person you would be replying to, and something is being asserted in public that will otherwise stand unanswered.
Fails when:
You are the one being targeted rather than a bystander speaking up, replying risks extending the exchange and handing the other person the engagement they were after, or there is no audience beyond the two of you for a reply to reach.

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.

Works when:
You want a factual account of what happened to exist somewhere other than your memory, particularly because nothing else may be creating one.
Fails when:
Rereading it becomes a way of reliving it, or you start expecting the record itself to stop something, get someone banned, or oblige anyone to act.

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.

Works when:
The person wants a reaction from you specifically, is acting alone, and the venue is not one where silence reads as concession to an audience that matters.
Fails when:
Several accounts are involved, the audience rather than you is the target, the provocation is defamatory and will stand unanswered, or you are being told to absorb harm quietly because responding is treated as your failure.

The grey rock method

Responding in a deliberately neutral, minimal and emotionally flat way, so that provoking you stops producing anything worth having.

Works when:
Contact cannot easily be avoided — a co-parent, a colleague, a family member — and the realistic goal is to limit how much the interaction costs you.
Fails when:
Abuse is ongoing or escalating, you cannot sustain it consistently, or you need the underlying behaviour to actually change.