Humanizing Internet trolls

Humanizing Internet trolls is Lindy West’s hard-won approach to online abuse: recognize the humanity of people who inflict it without denying the harm or requiring their targets to forgive them. A troll’s apology, delivered after he had used her dead father’s identity to torment her, gave West evidence that a person could be reached. It did not make the abuse harmless, end the harassment, or turn compassion into a universal rule.

The Problem with Silence

West begins from the bind imposed by conventional advice to ignore trolls. Responding can be framed as taking the bait; refusing to respond can leave the target exposed as a punching bag. In her case, silence would not discipline the person impersonating her father, relieve her distress, or bring her father back. The choice was not between a dignified response and an undignified one, but between different ways of living with an attack that had already made its mark.

Her decision to speak back was grounded first in her own mental health, which she placed ahead of a troll’s satisfaction. She also understood a public response as potentially useful to other women: some had told her that the way she answered gave them a script for facing abusive people in their own lives. The act of replying therefore had both a personal and a communal purpose. West was not only answering one person; she was challenging the assumption that targets must remain silent to avoid rewarding abuse.

The deeper reason was her refusal to answer dehumanization with dehumanization. West describes trolls as human beings who have lost their way and want others to suffer alongside them. That account does not absolve them. It shifts the question from whether an abuser deserves to be treated as a monster to whether treating him as one can undo the damage or make a different outcome possible.

An Unprecedented Apology

The week after the impersonation, West wrote about the experience in a Jezebel article on trolling. She wrote with sadness, candor, anger, and evident pain. A few hours after the article appeared, the troll contacted her by email. His message included an apology and a receipt for a fifty-dollar donation to Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, designated in memory of Paul West and directed to the area of greatest need.

West found the apology startling because it contradicted what she understood about the usual course of trolling. She had not received one before, had not heard of anyone else receiving one, and had encountered scholars who studied trolling and said that public remorse was precisely what trolls did not offer. The donation made the apology concrete: it was not merely a change in tone, but an act directed toward an institution in her father’s memory. Still, West’s first response was uncertainty, not immediate trust. She asked whether the gesture was real and, if so, thanked him.

When they later spoke, the exchange did not produce a simple resolution. West explained that the impersonation had been the cruelest thing anyone had done to her, especially because her father had died only recently. She also told the troll that he was the only one she had heard of apologizing. He sounded defeated; she believed him. She did not set out to forgive him, but found that she did. The conversation ended with mutual thanks and ordinary pleasantries, a small, human conclusion that could not reverse what had happened.

Human, and Still Responsible

The encounter unsettled West partly because the troll seemed so ordinary outside his online conduct. He had female coworkers who enjoyed his company and a girlfriend who loved him; they did not know that he had used the internet to traumatize women. These facts do not excuse his behavior. They expose the difficulty of holding together two impressions of the same person: someone capable of ordinary relationships and someone who deliberately inflicted cruelty while hidden behind a screen.

West’s account also resists the comforting claim that online abuse is separate from real life. Anonymous commenters described seeing her at a movie theater, serving her at a restaurant, or sitting beside her at a bar years earlier; they used these supposed encounters to scrutinize her behavior and appearance. For West, such messages made the boundary between online conduct and offline life feel unreliable. Trolls were not an abstract category of villains at a distance, but people who could move through everyday social spaces while concealing a capacity for targeted abuse.

Humanization therefore does not mean that West wished trolls well without qualification or that she expected their targets to offer mercy. She explicitly rejects any obligation to forgive people who abuse them, and does not promise to respond with warmth to every person who insults her. Her own response is a possibility, not a prescription. The distinction matters: compassion describes what changed in her, not a standard she imposes on other people.

Ongoing Harm and a Changed Response

The apology did not end the harassment. West continued to receive abuse and described it as a daily drain on her time and mental health. She did not wish pain on the people responsible, reasoning that their own pain was part of how the situation had arisen. If the troll’s account of seeking meaning in his life was true, she saw it as a troubling explanation for the cruelty—not a justification for it, and not a problem she could solve for millions of anonymous strangers.

After an audio segment about the conversation aired on This American Life, West had to report six more Twitter accounts using her father’s name and face. One account rebuked her for writing about her abortion, framing it as though the person behind the account had a familial claim on her. The recurrence made clear that one apology had not transformed the online environment. Yet West says that handling each new impersonation became easier. Remembering the humanity of the people behind such attacks could change the emotional timbre of her encounters: pity made it harder to feel hurt or frightened, and harder to answer cruelty with cruelty.

The force of the concept lies in this unresolved coexistence. West retains the reality of the injury, the persistence of the abuse, and the need to protect her own mental health; she also refuses to make an abuser’s worst act the only truth about him. The apology and memorial donation are evidence, for her, that people can be reached. They are not proof that every troll will change, that every target should engage, or that remorse repairs what has been done. Humanizing Internet trolls names a difficult practice of keeping the person visible without letting that visibility erase the harm.