The convention of not responding to online trolls

The convention of not responding to online trolls presents silence as the safest response, but Lindy West exposes its limits after a troll’s attack invokes her dead father. She rejects the idea that non-engagement is automatically protective: when silence leaves the target feeling like a permanent punching bag, speaking back can become an assertion of agency rather than a concession to the troll.

The Rule and Its Assumptions

The familiar instruction is, “Don’t engage. It’s what they want.” The rule assumes that responding rewards a troll by giving the abuse attention, while ignoring it removes the troll’s incentive. West questions both assumptions. She asks whether silence might be what trolls want, and whether they care what their targets do at all. The convention thus offers certainty about an uncertain exchange: it prescribes a single response without establishing that the response will stop the abuse or help the person receiving it.

The Lose-Lose of Silence and Speech

West describes the dilemma as a double bind. If she responds, she can be dismissed as someone who took the bait; if she does not, she remains a target whose humiliation is left unanswered. In this instance, the abuse made her feel reduced to the idiot daughter of an embarrassed dead man, with the insult fixed on the public record. Ignoring the troll, she concludes, would neither chasten him, make her feel better, nor bring her father back. Non-engagement is therefore not a neutral escape from the encounter: it can leave its harm intact while offering no remedy for grief.

Speaking Back as an Alternative

West chooses to respond because her mental health matters more than a troll’s satisfaction. She also sees her answers as potentially useful beyond her own exchange: they can embolden other women to speak online and in person, and give women a script for dealing with monsters in their own lives. Her reasoning turns speech from a presumed reward to the troll into a resource for the people targeted by abuse.

That choice does not depend on treating trolls as monsters in return. West insists that they remain human beings who have lost their way and want others to flounder too. Because their conduct dehumanizes her, she rejects dehumanization as the answer. The convention’s failure, in her account, is not simply that silence may fail to stop a troll; it is that a supposedly protective rule can deny targets the choice to act and can reproduce the very reduction of people to less than human that the abuse enacts. Speaking back becomes a deliberate alternative, grounded in self-preservation, solidarity, and recognition of the other person’s humanity.