ONLINE posts often devolve into battlegrounds where substantive debate gives way to manipulative tactics. Here I reveal ‘The Trolls’ Playbook’: a collection of rhetorical manoeuvres to distract, misrepresent, dodge, discredit, project, and feign constructiveness. Or rather they revealed themselves to me when I posted a recent TCW article of mine on LinkedIn, explicitly to invite a thoughtful discussion of safeguarding policy. Instead I got trolled.
The commentators’ profiles look innocent enough, declaring nothing except ‘retired’ or ‘concerned citizen’. Their real intent was different. Rather than addressing my critique of the UK government policy of screening boys for the pre-crime of violence against women and girls instead of foreigners who are many times more likely to commit such crimes, they went for the attack, deploying all the worst troll tactics.
Trolls are partisans who attack what threatens their politics and business; they are the advisers and lobbyists behind the policy in question, the contractors who expect to make money from implementing it.
On my post a minority were the most active. Five posters accounted for almost all the 300 comments: a woman who headlines herself as a ‘weaver of insight and practice’, a man who claims to have worked in and advised on child safeguarding, one who claims to write books on emotional intelligence for children, another who headlines himself as ‘design business founder’ and ’philanthropist’, and one who self-categorises as a ‘cultural anthropologist’.
They are, I suspect, all highly dependent on partisan work, being short of the credentials, skills and integrity to succeed elsewhere. This self-selection affects how they troll. Breaking down their playbook I identified these tactics:
1. Distraction
They don’t have the substance to defeat evidence-based work, so they start with distraction. For instance, an early commentator described an AI-generated image as ‘stupid, deliberately provocative, and racist’. Another self-proclaimed expert suggested that ‘consent lessons’ for boys would solve misogyny.
Every one avoided the evidence for foreign propensity, such as conviction rates or risk patterns. There’s no perfect solution to this, but what you can do is point out the distraction for what it is, and demand engagement with the post.
2. Misrepresentation
The troll’s second play is to distort data while accusing the original poster of bias. The self-professed adviser on safeguarding claimed I ‘made up’ the data. In fact, they’re official. Although he did not repeat this embarrassing mistake, he kept commenting that I was misrepresenting the data (ironic). There’s no perfect solution, but a good response is to ask for specification of any data misrepresented. He could not.
Another commentator deserves to be called out by name because it’s a bot: ‘Pragmatic Politics’ kept posting a link to what it called a fact-check. But the link is not a fact check. There’s not a fact in it, not a challenge to any fact in my post, not even a counter-fact. It’s an AI-generated spin of the semantics. It takes a word from my post and pretends that the word exaggerates something or ignores something. It’s bad AI.
One of the commenters quotes my article’s statistic that foreign nationals are 1.7 times more likely to be convicted of sex crimes, but notes that foreigners comprise only 14-16 per cent of the population, before concluding that British citizens commit the ‘vast majority’. This misrepresents absolute counts as proportional propensity. There’s no perfect solution, but here I pointed out the ignorant mathematics.
Another commenter claims that one particular page of official data disproves foreign propensity. In fact, it reproves the risk. The page doesn’t present the propensity, just absolute numbers. He pointed to the larger number of Britons committing crimes as evidence that Britons are riskiest, without admitting that Britons represent a larger proportion of residents than of crimes.
| Ethnicity data for defendants and victims for rape, sexual assault and h… |
When corrected, this commentator kept reposting this page, characterising the data as ‘CPS data’ because the source is the Crown Prosecution Service, with the claim that conviction data are more meaningful than arrest data. But almost all the data I present are conviction data. And he kept ignoring the fact that the CPS data prove foreigners are likelier than Britons to commit misogynist crimes.
The only solution here is to restate the facts and the misrepresentation.
3. Dodge
Trolls smear with generalisations, assumptions, and categorisations that dodge engagement with the content.
Naturally, we resist whatever conflicts with assumptions. We call the emotional discomfort ‘dissonance’. Admitting dissonance would be honest, and also a step to engagement. But trolls don’t engage and they’re not honest. They react to headlines or conclusions but pretend to have read in between when they clearly have not. They give themselves away by refusing to specify any flaws, or making them up.
You can demand specification, which often provokes an alternative dodge. The troll admits he hasn’t read the post, but claims he doesn’t need to because he already knows what it contains. One troll claimed that my post’s graphic ‘doesn’t persuade me to read the article’, then went on to criticise the article.
Another early commenter wrote: ‘What is message here? I’d say it’s one of xenophobia, maybe even racism, the headline gives it away.’
When I pointed out that I know who has read my own Substack, the trolls kept claiming they had certainly read it, and that it wasn’t behind a paywall, and they had screenshots of the first few lines to prove it (lines in front of the paywall).
The troll pivots to tangential issues, as if the poster is mistargeted. For instance, the ‘weaver’ countered with data on online radicalisation and school harassment. That’s a dodge of the scope of the article, to which she added a dodge of the official data. She cited the Youth Endowment Fund and Girlguiding, which are not official and are ideological too.
Take this dodge of the scope from the self-claimed practitioner in child safeguarding: ‘This is poorly written and emotive. It does little to advance the cause of tackling misogyny and anti-women abuse. We need to tackle the influence of people like Andrew Tate on social media who radicalise young men and boys. A universal approach is required.’
Once again, he could not specify any poor writing or emotiveness, and he could not specify anything wrong with a targeted approach.
4. Discredit
When arguments falter, the troll escalates to personal vilification. I suffered claims that my gender, citizenship, residency and/or ethnicity disqualify me.
Often, these attacks accompany claims as to the attacker’s superior identity. Take this parting shot from the ‘weaver’, who escalated herself to defender of democracy: ‘Five of my six kids are still in the UK education (where I live) – so it’s possible that my “anecdotes” are more accurate than your Texas-based crock of nonsense. Get a healthier hobby. Like other sovereign nations, we don’t want or need other states interfering with our democratic processes.’
Then there is the misrepresentation used to discredit: ‘The complete inability to form an articulate argument to support your lies and confections makes me strongly suspect that you bought your PhD from eBay.’
A variation is to discredit the victims in the poster. An early commentator said my post is defending ‘your boys’ who are ‘wife-beaters’. When I asked how schoolboys could be wife-beaters, he pivoted to racism.
Shifting from content to character is another dodge, and insulting to boot. But ad hominem attacks are the easiest to call out. To anyone with any sense, a series of ad hominem attacks proves the virtue and rigour of the post.
5. Project
Trolls always think they’re virtuous while they project bile on to their victims. For instance, that ‘weaver’ dodged my complaint about the British government demonising all boys for misogyny, then accused me of ‘collective suspicion’ of foreigners. Yes, hypocrisy too is endemic to trolls. Similarly, when I point out an ad hominem attack, sometimes they accuse me of the same. The difference is that they can’t specify any.
6. Feign Constructiveness
Finally, once all the other tactics have been dissembled, the troll masks trolling as constructiveness. For instance, many commentators started with their concern about misogyny, then pretended that my criticism of government policy proves that I support misogyny.
Take this comment from the ‘weaver of insight and practice’: ‘Without a school-based framework to deconstruct these ideologies, we leave young boys vulnerable to harmful influences that skew their understanding of healthy relationships.’
Take this passive-aggression from Pragmatic Politics: ‘We believe that toxic masculinity needs calling out, it needs education. Regardless of the many other risks to women that also need addressing, do you not share the belief that abuse in relationships needs to be tackled? That women deserve safety in said relationships?’
My original post invited thoughtful discussion. I didn’t get it. But I engaged the trolls to get content for this article and to raise the engagement score on LinkedIn. You can turn trolls to your advantage.
A final reminder: although trolls write most of the comments, they account for a tiny minority of readers. Most readers are afraid to counter the trolls because that exposes them too to trolling, and trolls have more time and less restraint. But you still prove yourself to your silent majority when you challenge the trolls.
