Don't Feed the Trolls

Low-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 low-effort or absurdist posting that degrades a discussion, usually disruptive rather than targeted.

• Engagement bait

  Posting confident errors or reply-prompts to farm corrections and comments; Cunningham's Law used as a growth tactic.

• 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.

Inflammatory 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.

Bad 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.

Several 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.

Organised, 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.

Doxxing, swatting, stalking and sustained harassment campaigns. These are not the far end of the trolling spectrum; they are a different kind of act, and treating them as continuous with flamebait is how real harm gets minimised.

Response: Stop reading this site and contact the relevant platform and authorities. Documentation first, engagement never.

• 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.