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. The Australian eSafety Commissioner defines trolling as someone posting or commenting online to deliberately upset others. [1]
Key facts
- A regulator's version: Australia's eSafety Commissioner gives the advice as "don't feed the trolls", says responding is likely to make things worse, and says to report the abuse instead. [2] Where to report is on the report page.
- Its stated reason: eSafety says getting involved in an online argument gives the troll the reaction they want, so they are likely to step up the attack. [3]
- One study in its favour: Evita March concludes, from her own study, that the classic internet adage appears to hold true: don't feed the trolls. [4] It is a single study, and its limits are set out below.
- The word, not the phrase: Wikipedia's article on trolling gives the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest known attestation of the internet sense of "troll" as 1992. [5] That is about the word, not the phrase; where the phrase comes from is covered below.
Where does "don't feed the trolls" come from?
This site cannot date the phrase: none of its archived sources says when "don't feed the trolls" was first said. What they do cover is the origin of the word "troll" in internet use, and the two are not the same question.
Wikipedia's article on trolling says there are competing theories of where and when the word was first used in internet slang, with numerous unattested accounts of BBS and Usenet origins in the early 1980s or before. [6] It also says the first usage of the term was on Usenet in the early 1990s, in the phrase "trolling for newbies" as used in the newsgroup alt.folklore.urban. [7] It describes that early sense as considerably narrower than the modern understanding of the term, and as considered a positive contribution. [8]
Does "don't feed the trolls" work?
It depends on who is doing the provoking and who is watching. The evidence this site cites in its favour is one psychology study. Writing in The Conversation, its author, Evita March, says she assessed participants' orientation towards negative social potency and their engagement in trolling behaviours on Facebook. [9] In her study, negative social potency predicted trolling more strongly than psychopathy or sadism did. [10] She writes that this discovery suggests an easy way to deal with trolls: ignore them, rather than giving them the satisfaction of an angry reaction. [11] The article describes no experiment in which anyone was ignored, so that is a suggestion drawn from the finding, not a measured result of ignoring.
The two jobs it does
This site, Don't Feed the Trolls, is named after a phrase that is doing two completely different jobs, and only one of them holds up well. It is worth examining for that reason.
The advice is doing one job at the scale of a newsroom, a platform or an account with reach, and a different job at the scale of one person being provoked. At the first, it is an argument about amplification: attention is the resource being competed for, and repeating something supplies it. At the second, it is advice about what you personally should do in a moment. The case is much stronger for the first than the second, and the second is the one most people actually receive.
That gap is not just this site's opinion. The usual advice may let an individual get through the moment while leaving the wider damage untouched. [12]
This section used to open by saying the phrase began as an amplification argument and was later retargeted at individuals. That is a claim about history, and nothing in this site's sources supports it — the archived sources that mention the phrase at all present it as advice to individuals first. The argument here never needed the origin story: it rests on the two scales, not on which came first.
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. [13]
The striking part is how it compares with the traits usually blamed: in that study it predicted trolling more strongly than psychopathy or sadism did. [10] 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.
What should you actually do when someone is trolling you?
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 (see what dogpiling means) 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.