In the early internet, trolling was mostly a nuisance—anons baited forum members for laughs or stirred chaos in comment sections just because they could.
In 2025, trolling is a governing philosophy. In the U.S., national figures use their platforms to overwhelm one half of the country while delighting the other. Abusive behavior like this is happening more often at the local level, too.
This is partly possible because we live in a fragmented communication environment, where good-faith attempts to reach the broader public often fail, and trolling is the only thing that seems to break through. Yet not everyone reads X or browses internet comment sections. So how do trolls reach their targets? Headlines, for one.
I was once in the trenches. Back in the mid-2000s, when Twitter seemed like a promising new way for journalists to reach the public, I witnessed local reporters sharing well-researched investigations and important stories online, only to be met with insults and misrepresentation from partisan operatives.
Often, the reporters turned the other cheek. But I wasn’t a journalist myself, and my professional distance—plus a need to be a "force of karma," as a friend once put it—pulled me in. So I started countertrolling: parachuting into fights and calling out overt lies. At first, the easy pickins felt like winning, so over time, I scaled up, flooding bad-faith actors’ feeds and rendering their spaces useless. But eventually, this ate into my life and made me feel gross.
What I learned was this: it’s impossible to beat trolls at their own game. At best, the process is degrading. At worst, you become a troll yourself. No matter what, every engagement feeds the cycle. D’oh!
Sadly, the thing I swore off over a decade ago—let’s call it 'trolling the zone'—is now mainstream. Trolling is not just a tool for attention; it’s a means of exerting real, frightening power. In the hands of the powerful, it becomes a potent smokescreen. It is effective at creating confusion, generating outrage, and dominating the global media cycle. News organizations, often unwittingly, play into it—trapping their audiences in an endless loop of adrenaline.
So what’s the alternative? Now that we all have our own bubbles, voicing outrage online can feel like screaming into the wilderness: the algorithm doesn’t tend to reward saying things your audience agrees with. Counter-trolling might feel like fighting the good fight, and the platforms encourage it through feedback—but it’s just a dopamine trap that, in the end, rewards abuse and risks turning us into abusive people.
The very boring, original, number one, rock-solid rule of dealing with trolls is: "Don’t feed the trolls." Trolls thrive on knowing they’ve been seen. Any reaction—even blocking, if they can verify they’ve been blocked—feeds them. But they don’t know how to respond to indifference.
Is indifference an option for news organizations? Not really. But there’s one step we could take to do better.
If we all agree that news consumers deserve journalism that informs rather than inflames, that elevates truth over provocation, then every newsroom should ask before publishing: Are we amplifying the trolls? If the answer is yes, understand that what you’re about to do is worse than stenography—it’s trolling your own audience.
To take it a bit further—and maybe dust off my troll hat a little—I’ll propose something radical: a sort of compromise for the person caught between being a news junkie and an avoider. What if news organizations created a “Trump tab,” where tales of official trolling are easily accessible in their own space but don’t pollute everything else? Consumers could choose to engage with that tab when they’re ready—while the default remains focused on other stories that matter. (Looking at you, New York Times.)
At a minimum, maybe it’s time to build (or update) a News Consumer’s Bill of Rights—one that prioritizes fairness over bait, meaning over spectacle. I like aspects of Axios’s framework for audience rights, rooted in transparency, accountability, and fact-based journalism.
But it’s now missing something: the right not to be trolled.
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Interesting quotes
The moral struggle and weight of doing the right thing. Shifting realities and leaders unwilling to face them. The slow unraveling of a social contract, leaving people unmoored. Polarization, anomie, the extremes of democracy feeding on themselves. Attention as the new currency, disinformation as the dominant language. The spectacle of decline. Powerful men burning it all down—clumsy, absurd, inevitable. The nostalgia for something stable, the hope for something better. The possibility that from the wreckage, something new might emerge.
Programming note: We’re a bit heavy on The New York Times this month—sorry about that! As part of a New Year’s reset to cut back on email overwhelm, I started sending all my newsletters to a separate folder, but a few still landed directly in my inbox. This gave them more prominence than the filtered ones, and I’m working on fixing that. But the quotes are still worth it (IMO)!
“Maybe that’s why so many people don’t do the right thing — because it’s hard and it hurts.” — Aquilino Gonell, For Many of Us, Jan. 6 Never Ended
“Biden’s greatest flaw, like Lear’s, was his unwillingness to face a changing reality.” — Peter Coy, The tragedy of Joe Biden
“A lot of us are also grieving the end of a social movement, the extended cumulative shock of a pandemic and the end of Barack Obama’s multiracial coalition. That’s not just grief; that’s something akin to what sociologists call anomie. That’s a collective sense that a social contract — the norms on which we rely to navigate the vicissitudes of society — is broken.” — Tressie McMillan Cottom, Left unresolved, the inherent conflicts of democracy will produce its extremes
“Defining ourselves against Mr. Trump came at a cost. By extension it meant defining ourselves against all of his supporters, including our relatives. I became ruptured — what I’d been fighting all along.” — Jean Guerrero, How I Crossed the Border Back to Myself
“As powerful as money is in politics, attention is even more so. We have largely failed to regulate the role of money in politics. For attention, the problem is worse — and we have not even begun to attempt solutions.” — Ezra Klein, Trump Has Something He Would Like to Bring to Your Attention
“The more time you spend having your mind changed online, the more you might sense that there’s something odd about the way in which opinions tend to be formed and held today.” — Joshua Rothman, Should You Question Everything?
“Dive too deeply into the friend-enemy distinction, by contrast, and it can become immoral to treat your enemies with kindness if kindness weakens the community in its struggle against a mortal foe. In the world of the friend-enemy distinction, your ultimate virtue is found in your willingness to fight. Your ultimate vice is betraying your side by refusing the call to political war.” — David French, How a German Thinker Explains MAGA Morality
“I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down. What I didn’t expect, and don’t think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be.” — Rebecca Shaw, I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers
“The billionaire tech moguls seated on the inaugural platform also suggest that social media platforms from X to Facebook are likely to privilege Trump’s conspiracy theories and disinformation over facts and truth — another authoritarian win.” — Thomas B. Edsall, So Much for Not Taking Trump Literally
“Greed had become kindling.” — Mark Arax, How Los Angeles Dreams Became Kindling
“Here’s how America recovered: Populist indignation finally got professionalized. In the 20th century, members of the progressive movement took the problems the populists were rightly angry about and built the institutions that were required to address them effectively — like the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve. Populists had trouble thinking institutionally; the progressives, who were well trained, morally upright, self-disciplined, disgusted by corruption, intellectually rigorous (and sometimes priggish and arrogant) did not have that problem.” — David Brooks, How Trump Will Fail
“What will become clear once AI ammunition becomes available is just how unsuited most companies are for high precision agents, just as P&G was unsuited for highly-targeted advertising. No matter how well-documented a company’s processes might be, it will became clear that there are massive gaps that were filled through experience and tacit knowledge by the human ammunition.” — Ben Thompson, AI’s Uneven Arrival
“Before the team at Georges Media, including the Baton Rouge Advocate and Times-Picayune, expanded into Shreveport-Bossier City, they spent hours with local business and civic leaders trying to understand what was happening on the ground. ‘What we heard was medieval.’ as their executive editor, Rene Sanchez, put it, ‘a stark portrait of a metro area descending into a kind of Dark Ages of either no news or disinformation.’” — David Grant, Making your expansion into a new market stick
“It remains early days here, I think, with my own guess continuing to be that some of the creators will morph into sustainable news organizations of the future, a few of them perhaps leaders in the field.” — Dick Tofel, Thinking About The People Formerly Known as the Press
“‘This is what your new lifestyle will feel like,’ vowed the website of a facility called Vivamayr in southern Austria. ‘Mentally and physically invigorated | full of new perspectives | light, free and clear | vitalized and energized.’ I had never been any of those. I did worry that they all sounded a bit like euphemisms for ‘hungry.’” — Caity Weaver, How My Trip to Quit Sugar Became a Journey Into Hell
“A study this week revealed that the multi-billion dollar trade in ornamental plants—including olive trees, cut roses, and exotic shrubs—is opening up new vectors for invasive species, such as insects, frogs, geckos, and snakes.” — Becky Ferreira, Snakes (in a Pot) on a Plane
“Your personal brand is a lagging indicator of you doing great, meaningful work.” — Elena Verna, You don't need to build a personal brand
Last month’s shuffle
Each month, I put together a Spotify playlist of the songs that caught my ear. Some are familiar to me, some aren’t. Some are old, some are new. The playlist tends to span eras, genres, and sounds. It’s probably not for everyone but here it is!