How to Deal with Trolling

Trolling, and cancellation campaigning, is a horrible practice, and the sooner we non-trolls can all figure that out, and get on the same page as far as how to deal with it, the better.

I am one of the most censored and canceled artists that I know of. For offending Zionists and others, I have had my YouTube channel "permanently deleted" for a month, I've had all my music pulled from YouTube Music for several months, and I've been banned from Facebook for months on end and had major features of the platform disabled for years. In an average month, I block and delete thousands of horrible comments from trolls, mostly on Facebook. Organizations and people associated with them from UK Lawyers for Israel to the Antideutsche to Rose City Antifa have long considered me persona non grata, and from both the right and the alleged left, people try to ruin my life and get all my gigs canceled, mostly using various trolling techniques on social media platforms.

As a result of these sorts of experiences over the past 24 years or so, especially the past 6, I've become a bit of an expert on trolling, and cancellation campaigning.

I've written a lot of essays in response to the trolls and their ideological leaders from both Zionist organizations and alleged antifascist ones, setting the record straight and exposing their deceptive, manipulative methods, and their lies. Doing these sorts of clarifications of reality have been important and helpful, although they only go a little way in dealing with the bigger problems that the trolling phenomenon brings us.

All the focus on clarifying reality and exposing troll lies in my particular case has meant that I haven't taken a whole lot of time to talk about the phenomenon generally, in ways that might be helpful for other people who are being tragically impacted by it. That's my aim today.

I've recently been inspired to write about the trolling phenomenon more broadly after witnessing a trolling effort cause an independent political campaign to be seriously impacted. Seeing this happening in real time reminded me of something I already know too well: that most people who have not been targeted by a trolling campaign are usually not really aware of what is happening to those of us who are targeted, they don't know how to react to trolling when it happens to them, or even how to identify it when it is happening.

I asked Grok what are the major forms of trolling when it comes to public figures and political campaigns, and what are the best ways to respond to it to minimize its impact. Grok's summary of the major forms of trolling was very good, and seems to have largely been taken from a Rand Corporation study I read years ago, but it's still all accurate, from my very extensive personal experience.

• Provocative / flame trolling: Direct insults, inflammatory statements, or emotionally charged attacks meant to start arguments or elicit hostility. Classic “baiting.”
• Concern trolling: Feigning sympathy or shared goals while undermining the target. Examples include “I’m on your side, but I’m worried this candidate is unelectable / too extreme / using the wrong tactics” or tone-policing framed as helpful advice. It positions the troll as an ally while shifting the burden or sowing doubt.
• Sea-lioning (sealioning): Relentless, polite-seeming demands for evidence, clarifications, or detailed justifications that exhaust the target and make them appear unreasonable or defensive when they disengage. Originating in a comic about intrusive demands for proof.
• Brigading: Coordinated mass action by a group (often from another community, Discord, or subreddit) to flood comments, mass downvote/upvote, spam a narrative, or harass a target. This includes vote brigading, comment flooding, and harassment campaigns.
• Humorous / memetic / shitposting trolling: Use of irony, absurdity, memes, or exaggerated mockery that may be playful or weaponized to derail or ridicule. Can range from light-hearted to pointed ideological attacks.
• Partisan / ideological / astroturfing / firehose trolling: Coordinated or sponsored efforts (including state-linked or partisan networks using sockpuppets and bots) to push narratives, amplify division, suppress opposing views, or attack specific figures/campaigns. Related to “firehose of falsehood” high-volume, low-consistency messaging. This overlaps with disinformation campaigns.
• Griefing / sustained harassment-oriented trolling: More personal or persistent attacks aimed at distress, sometimes escalating toward doxxing or threats (though pure doxxing is often categorized separately as severe harassment). In gaming or community contexts, this includes sabotage; online, it can mean relentless personal targeting.

I can vouch for all of these different techniques as being common, and I can say with absolute certainty that all of them work brilliantly, and cause tremendous amounts of distress and damage to people, campaigns, and social movements.

As with most things, understanding what's happening goes a long way to being able to deal with it better. Why is it so effective and what can be done to make it less effective?

I would say there are three profoundly important and ever-present problems that continually sabotage so many people, organizations, and movements, and they can be put into three categories: the nature of the internet, the nature of social media platforms as they are now structured, and our captured culture.

The Nature of the Internet

Even without social media and its algorithms, the interconnectedness of the world that the internet brings has its pros and cons. One of the profound disadvantages is the ability of one nefarious actor, one FBI agent, one jilted ex with a desire for revenge, or anyone else with access to the internet to ruin the lives of multiple people with very little effort.

The kind of effort that would have been required to do what can now be done by setting a Google Alert is fairly mind-boggling. For those unfamiliar with Google Alerts, if you set one for any semi-public figure, every time they are mentioned on a public website or in a public social media post, you will be notified within 24 hours or less.

So if you're trying, say, to get a musician's gigs canceled, your Google Alerts will tell you when they put out a listing for a show that's coming up, at which point you know where and when it's happening and you can contact the venue and tell them the guy is a fill-in-the-blank and their gig should therefore be canceled.

Algorithmic Social Media

The work of the trolls, whether they're employed by the FBI, the local police, or freelance, already made easy by the internet, is amplified by social media in altogether new ways. Whereas a comment on a blog post might have some kind of impact, it's absolutely minimal in comparison with a comment on a Facebook post or a post on most other social media platforms.

People who are of a certain age may not have really noticed that their news feed is no longer a history of your friends most recent posts, in the order they were posted, as it once was. It's now all about algorithms. So when you're trying to promote an event and someone comments about how someone involved with the event is a fill-in-the-blank, and then those allegations inspire more comments from other people who agree or disagree with them, the engagement represented by this activity will cause the post to be seen by far more people. That is, conflict is one of those things that is always promoted by the algorithms.  Reasonable discourse never is.

Our Captured Culture

Somewhere along the line society generally and what we may loosely call the left end of it in particular lost the plot in many ways. We collectively forgot that Cointelpro ever happened, forgot about all the basic methods employed by the FBI to systematically undermine, sabotage, and neutralize the American left since the formation of this secret police bureau.

In our state of collective amnesia, it seems we devised a whole philosophy of life that was made to be used to the advantage of those who want to destroy us. From somewhere in the bowels of academia came the notion that anytime anyone claims to be a victim, they should be believed. The notion that there are various sorts of nefarious actors ready and willing to take full advantage of this kind of orientation never seems to occur to most of our compromised culture.

Instead, we're terrified of being accused of siding with oppression and oppressors if we dare question the narrative of someone claiming to be a victim. We automatically assume there must be validity in someone's claims, and that their claims should be taken with the utmost seriousness. We're prepared to change or cancel events in order to make those claiming to be victims "feel safe." We have been trained to believe that it is an imposition for us to seek to find out the actual details of the allegations.

All of this makes it incredibly easy for a mentally ill person or a nefarious actor to throw a bomb into any proceedings, simply by chiming in on a social media post and claiming they are victims of someone involved with an event or a campaign, and that they won't feel safe attending the event unless that person is not involved, or unless that person apologizes for something, or goes through some kind of hypothetical accountability process.

How Do We Change this Equation?

There are all kinds of people with all kinds of issues they need to work on, no doubt. But there are also lots of different ways folks who have an issue with someone else can use to address a situation. If people choose to make public, slanderous statements about someone on a social media post, this is an indication they are up to no good. This is not a way to resolve a problem or seek accountability, it is an effort to sabotage a person, an event, campaign, etc.

We need to collectively understand that there is nothing legitimate or acceptable about public comments slandering other people. That's trolling, and trolling is bad, not helpful, nothing redeeming about it. The automatic response to such comments should be to delete them and block the troll making the posts.

It doesn't matter if the troll in question is an obvious fake anonymous troll account with hardly any followers or a real person with a name. The act of trolling is what is a bad faith behavior, regardless of who is doing it for what supposed reasons. The thing any organizer of an event or promoter of a campaign who controls a social media platform that is being trolled with such comments needs to do is block and delete, aggressively.

In many cases the blocking and deleting is something you'll only need to do with a handful of accounts, especially if the trolling is coming from a real person, rather than a paid troll farm, in which case you, like me, may be facing the task of deleting and blocking thousands of comments and accounts each month.

If someone has serious concerns about you or one of your associates involved with an event, campaign, etc., they can write you privately and tell you in great detail about what the situation is. But if they just say something happened and now they feel unsafe, especially if they do that in a public comment, they are not acting in good faith, they are just throwing bombs. This needs to be understood, or we'll remain crippled by our belief that bad-faith actors need to be given our scarce time and attention.

If we have a real concern about the truth behind allegations made about a public figure, but we don't have the time or don't want to spend the time trying to find out what happened or if there's any veracity to the allegations, if we even understand what they are supposed to be in the first place, consulting a chatbot can be very illuminating. At least in my case, you can ask a chatbot what are the allegations against David Rovics, and is there any truth to them, and the chatbot will explain what I'm allegedly guilty of, and why each of the charges is ridiculous.

In so many other cases, the chatbot will explain that a handful of social media accounts have been raising issues about someone for the past couple months, ever since they became especially prominent because of their success in some organizing effort.

One of the biggest problems with all of the trolling, if we take it seriously and engage with it as if it should be taken seriously, is it will sap us of all our time and energy, which is often by design. We must, of necessity and perhaps also on principle, assume people are innocent until they are proven to be guilty. We can't be vetting everybody to the extent that they must demonstrate that people trying to take them down by making negative comments about them in public social media forums are not telling the truth, and until then we can't publicly associate with the person in question. This is exactly the orientation, along with social media algorithms and trolling itself, that has brought us to this point where the left in the US is more ineffective and fractured than ever before.

If we engage with the trolls, there is simply no time to do anything else. If we believe the trolls, then we will end up destroying the potential of every one of those targeted by them.

I have literally seen most of the best organizers in the US get systematically canceled by trolling, and by those who take the trolls seriously and thus facilitate and participate in their actions. Many of the best artists have suffered this fate as well.

It requires a lot of certainty and discipline to respond to trolling effectively. An average of 20% of comments across social media are estimated to be trolling. With political figures this percentage tends to double.

The time spent by people arguing with or trying to placate trolls is absolutely staggering, from my extensive personal observation. The only thing more staggering than the time spent with these activities is the emotional toll it takes on those involved with it.

When people take the trolling seriously and engage with it, they help maintain the cloud of suspicion that surrounds all of the canceled organizers and artists and others.

Whether people engage with the trolls or try to pacify them, they will find pacification is impossible, and the more they engage, the worse everything gets for them and for anyone associated with the organizing effort they're involved with, which is under attack.

Regardless of how well they ignore the trolls, the trolling may continue, especially if a paid troll farm is involved, and it may become a constant headache. Whether it's a real person or a troll farm, they may persist in trying to sabotage events and campaigns for years into the future, and there's not necessarily any way to avoid this. But their impact will at least be minimized if you follow certain steps.

Don't believe them or pay attention to what they say. Assume it's not true, and if there are any truths about whoever it is that you need to find out about, you'll find out about them in the real world, without the aid of trolls making public comments that are obviously intended to undermine and foment division. Delete their comments and block their accounts, so you don't need to keep deleting their comments (at least until they create another sock puppet account to troll you with). Depending on the platform, change your settings so that only friends or followers can comment on posts, that can help a little.

While there are plenty of exceptions, the overwhelming majority of the time, by my personal observation, online trolling does not translate into real world harassment. Most of the time this is because the paid troll farm is located in another country, or the one person who hates your guts has very few friends who want to join them in confronting you at a public event. It's easy enough to pretend to be seventeen different people and swarm you on Instagram with sock puppet accounts, and relish the state of fear and distress this puts you in. It's another thing to show up at an event and troll someone in the real world.

Of course trolling people in the real off-line world is a tradition much older than the internet, and one that the FBI, police Red Squads, and sectarian wackos have engaged in for over a century.  (This is well-documented, and I have a lot of experience with this as well.)  But the vast majority of it is online, and we can dramatically minimize its impact simply by ignoring it, rather than fueling the fires the trolls are seeking to set.

For all of those reading this who are thinking, but if I don't take the allegations seriously, then I'll be accused of being an enabler of a fill-in-the-blank, and I'll be targeted for cancellation like that person, this can be true.  More often, you'll be targeted if you engage, but sometimes you'll be targeted for not engaging.  If you want to avoid that fate while still being politically active, you're dreaming of Camelot.  Stop trying to protect yourself from what is happening to so many of us all the time by distancing yourself from us out of some impossible desire for self-protection, this is not the way forward, and it also won't work with any degree of reliability.  

The way forward is for all of us, together, to ignore the trolls on the platforms where they're trying to get attention and sabotage people and events, whether they're coming after you, me, or somebody else.  The way forward is solidarity, the presumption of innocence, and kneejerk inclusivity.