The phrase this site is named after is old, universal, and almost never examined. It is worth examining, because it is doing two completely different jobs and only one of them holds up well.
Where the advice came from
"Don't feed the trolls" began as a claim about amplification, not about feelings. Its strongest formulation is an argument about what newsrooms, platforms and large accounts should decline to repeat, on the grounds that attention is the resource being competed for and coverage supplies it. At that scale the logic is sound and the stakes are institutional.
Somewhere along the way it was retargeted at individuals, and became advice about what a person being provoked should personally do. That is a much weaker claim, and it is the one most people actually receive.
The case for it
There is a real mechanism behind the advice, and it is worth stating properly rather than as folklore. Trolling is not simply antisocial personality expressed online; it appears to be specifically rewarded. Evita March's research measured what she calls negative social potency — the enjoyment some people report from causing anger, embarrassment and discord. [1]
The striking part is how much of the variance it accounts for: [2] If the behaviour is sustained by a social reward, then removing the reward is a coherent intervention rather than just a way of telling people to be quiet.
The case against it
The objection is not that disengaging never works. It is that the advice is applied indiscriminately, and that its costs land unevenly.
Three problems recur:
It assumes a single opponent. Silence starves one person of a reaction. It does nothing to a coordinated group, because you were never the audience — the audience is everyone watching a dozen apparently independent accounts agree about you. Disengaging from a manufactured consensus does not dissolve it.
It puts the burden on the target. When the standard response to being harassed is "you shouldn't have engaged," the person absorbing the harm becomes responsible for managing it, and the failure to stay silent becomes their mistake rather than someone else's choice.
It treats silence as costless. Sometimes it is. Sometimes an unanswered claim is simply believed.
So what should you actually do
The honest answer is that it depends on things you can check:
- 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 — see red lines.
- 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.
- What will replying cost you? This is a legitimate input, not a weakness.
Most of the time, for most people, disengaging is still the right move — and this site will tell you so. What it will not do is tell you that it is always the right move, because that is not what the evidence says.
And it is worth ending on the case where this advice does the most damage rather than the case where it works. Stalking guidance also says not to communicate with the person — but it says so as one line inside a plan that includes documenting every incident, reporting, and getting a trained person to assess the risk. Silence is the only part the two have in common. If that is your situation, nothing on this page is written for you.