The 5 Rules to Follow When Dealing with an Online Mob
How to survive online mobs.
Have you ever had hundreds or sometimes even thousands of angry people spewing hate at you online? Cursing you, threatening you, declaring that they’re going to ruin you?
I have. I have also been friends with or have advised several other people who have been through it.
I was thinking about that as I saw Joey Swoll, who’s one of the real good guys in the fitness space, badly mismanage getting attacked by an online rage mob.
It started after Hulk Hogan died and Joey Swoll reposted an old video. He said some very basic, nice things about Hulk Hogan:
This is pretty standard stuff, right? When an iconic entertainer dies, it’s not the least bit unusual for people to throw a few compliments his way. Many other people, myself included, also did that:
However, Joey Swoll caught a lot of flak over this because many years ago, Hogan had audio of him saying the N-word released, and even worse to most liberals, Hogan spoke at the Republican National Convention on behalf of Donald Trump and did a truly amazing, much-talked-about job of it:
In any case, Swoll originally stood tall after the criticism and made a video defending himself, where he then noted, “If you’re going to go after me, you better go after the colored (My emphasis) athletes, and the people that are black, and minority that went and posted him as well.”
Am I surprised he made that mistake? Yes, but we all know this is just all a dumb word game the Left plays, and it’s easy not to keep up with their constantly changing bullsh*t rules about what is supposed to be okay and what isn’t. I say this as someone who does this for a living, but still once got a Facebook strike for saying, “tr*nny.” I was like, “What the hell? When did that become a no-no word?”
Joey Swoll is not really a political guy, and he clearly wasn’t trying to be offensive, so who cares? Of course, not any normal people, but this kind of thing is irresistible bait for online rage mobs.
So, the heat turned up on Joey Swoll, and he tossed Hulk Hogan under the bus and apologized, which, almost comically, led to him then being bitterly criticized by conservatives for apologizing:
After all of this, Swoll, who is clearly not used to this, was ready to give it all up:
First of all, let me just note that he’s right about the “walk a mile in my shoes” part. When you have a yowling mob of idiots saying horrible things to you by the thousands, trying to get you cancelled, and aiming what seems like an endless stream of hate at you, it does something to you all the way, deep down in the reptilian center of your brain. You know, that ancient part of you that says, “If you get kicked out of the tribe, you’ll be alone and die!”
The natural response to that is to be EXTREMELY uncomfortable. You can get over it, but it takes going through it and building up a hide like a rhino over time. Getting to the point where you can just post something online under your real name, knowing you’re going to get hundreds of “f*** yous” and not care, takes time and experience.
Most people who get attacked by an online rage mob do not have that time and experience, so like an animal with their leg caught in a trap, they flail out in every which direction to make the whole thing stop.
This leads to the first mistake most people make.
1) Don’t explain yourself: If there’s a genuine misunderstanding between you and a friend or a loved one that is causing friction, what’s the first thing you try to do? You explain yourself. “No, you misheard me. I said she WASN’T as pretty as you,” or “I love your tacos. I only asked if you wanted to go out for dinner because you’ve been working so hard, and I thought you might enjoy going to your favorite restaurant instead of cooking for us after working all day.”
This is reasonable with people you know and care about, right? Well, it doesn’t work with rage mobs. Rage mobs are more like that famous Internet cartoon:
Internet mobs are there to be outraged and get satisfaction by tearing you down. The details don’t really matter to them. That’s why explaining yourself does no good and, as Joey Swoll found out, can do more harm than good.
2) Don’t apologize: If you genuinely do something wrong to a friend or family member, it usually makes sense to apologize. After all, you want to communicate that you admit that you made a mistake and you want to fix it. So, why doesn’t this work with rage mobs? Because they don’t want to fix it, they want to take joy in hurting you.
This is why, when you apologize to an online mob, it makes things WORSE. To them, an apology is concrete evidence that you did something wrong, so they feel like they are 100% justified in doing anything to you.
Incidentally, I should give you at least one case study that shows you how smart it is NOT TO APOLOGIZE, so let me tell you about Andrew Huberman. Andrew Huberman is a Stanford Professor who does a brilliant, in-depth, science-based fitness and nutrition podcast. Huberman is also apparently quite the ladies’ man.
According to an article in the Guardian (The New York Magazine article that kicked this off is now behind a paywall), Huberman, who is not married, had something like six girlfriends at once and got laid like a rock star while allegedly lying to them and supposedly giving one of them HPV. Huberman’s “spokesman” did clarify to the reporter that he has never tested positive for HPV, but otherwise, he didn’t have much to say.
Naturally, after this “scandal” hit, the haters came out of the woodwork, everyone was talking about it, and people were waiting to see how Huberman would respond. So, how did he respond? Well, he essentially didn’t. He just ignored it for roughly six weeks, and up until I was researching this article, I didn’t know he had responded at all. But apparently, later on a friendly podcast, he basically spewed out about a minute of word salad, neither confirming nor denying much of anything:
No apologies. No flagellating himself. No trying to please the mob – and what happened? It passed out of the public eye in a few days, and 98% of people forgot about it.
3) Be prepared to take some losses: If a limitless number of people decide they want your head, guess what? They may at least get an ear. You may get some death threats. People may call your job. From experience, I can also tell you that when the whole world wants your head, you shouldn’t expect a lot of support, and some people may even run the other way. In other words, there can be genuine consequences to an online mob targeting you.
On the other hand, are they going to be as bad as you’re imagining they are? Probably not. Chances are, nobody is going to try to kill you. You’re probably not going to lose your job, but if you do, you can go get another one. The vast majority of human beings simply aren’t going to care one way or the other.
In other words, having an online mob target you MAY have some kind of negative impact, of course, so does getting in a fender bender or getting stitches. It’s also worth explicitly noting that getting targeted by an online mob often has NO REAL-WORLD REPERCUSSIONS AT ALL. Point being, don’t catastrophize an attack by an online mob because even if you do take a hit, it’s unlikely to be the end of the world.
4) Don’t take it personally: We human beings evaluate ourselves based on feedback from the outside world much more than we admit. It’s easy to say, “I don’t care what other people think of me,” but as a practical matter, unless you’re talking about lunatics that are out of touch with reality, this is almost always false.
So, when an online mob attacks you and says all sorts of nasty and vulgar things, it can be a painful experience. However, do these people know you? No. Are they your friends or family? No. Are they even people whose opinions you respect? Very rarely, because people like that generally have better things to do than be part of a mean-spirited, 10,000-person pile-on.
In other words, it may FEEL personal, but it’s not personal. In fact, most of them are generally unhappy, unpleasant, angry people spewing their venom at whoever catches their attention because it makes their sad lives more bearable.
It could have been you; it could have been the guy who cut them off in traffic; or it could have been the Chipotle employee who took too long to bring them their food because half the people who were supposed to work that night didn’t show up for their shift. You just happened to be the one that caught their attention, so you’re the one they’re screaming, “F*** you!” at. Don’t forget that, or you’ll lose perspective in a hurry and go into a spiral.
5) Remember how quickly they will be distracted: In our fast-paced, social media-obsessed world, even a lot of the biggest stories fade away in short order. Today on X, people are rambling on about a jean’s ad Sydney Sweeney is in and former football player Shannon Sharpe losing his job. In a couple of days, Donald Trump or Conor McGregor will say something outrageous, Rosie O’Donnell or Whoopi Goldberg will say something stupid, or some crazy person will, just as you’d expect, do something crazy, and all the easily distracted people will be talking about that. I mean, there is a reason politicians tend to release bad news on Friday night. It’s because a lot of people will have forgotten about it by Monday morning.
Time can feel like it’s slowing down when thousands of mouth-breathing dolts are spewing their idiocy at you, but most of them have the attention spans of a puppy in a ball factory:
In other words, you may be thinking, “Oh, wow! I better get ahead of this, address it fast, and shut off all these mean comments,” but what you should be thinking is, “In two days, almost all these people raging against me will be distracted by something else.” So, as hard as it may seem, be patient and give the majority of the mob time to find a new shiny object to obsess over.
As someone who was an early target of the online mob when I dared to use a personal Twitter account to link George Soros to the first migrant caravan in 2018 (I was correct, if imprecise), I went through everything you said. I survived. And one of the benefits of going through the crucible, as difficult as it could be at times (it's worse when the mob tries to get you fired from your job and your company chairman is friends with George Soros), is finding out who your real friends are. I found that experience ultimately enriching.
I used to take the morons to task and carefully, clinically destroy their arguments with facts and logic. Because their tiny brains can't handle that they constantly jump from one topic they were outraged about to another. When they get stumped on "Climate change" to jump to "Abortion is healthcare" or "guns kill people". You can never pin them down. It's like Whack a Mole. I don't bother any more, don't have the time to waste with the idiots and they get so angry they might turn up at my house.