An Idiot's Guide To Not Being Trolled
Plus: paragliding into the Death Zone.
Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing - a romp through the sciences in search of a good wow.
This thing works in seasons, and the one we’re currently in is looking at the sciences of the atmosphere, which we’ll be returning to properly in the next edition.
But if you remember the recent story of early aeronauts Coxwell and Glaisher and their uncontrollable balloon ascent into the ‘Death Zone’ - here’s a modern equivalent from last week that’s just as blood-curdling…if it can be believed.
These are the Qilian mountains of China, on the border between the Qinghai and Gansu provinces in the north of the country.
Last week, Chinese paraglider Peng Yujiang posted video footage onto Douyin, the Chinese short-form video service that internationally became TikTok. It appeared to show him being caught in a “cloud suck”, an unusually powerful thermal of warm air rushing upwards, which quickly took him from around 3,000 metres (9,800 feet) all the way into the frigid and barely breathable height of 8.500 metres (27,800 feet), only slightly below the height of Everest.
As he told Chinese Media Group:
"It was terrifying... Everything was white. I couldn't see any direction. Without the compass, I wouldn't have known which way I was going. I thought I was flying straight, but in reality, I was spinning."
This is a still from the video he uploaded, via the BBC:
It’s an incredible story, and it’s astonishing he survived to tell the tale, and who wouldn’t want to believe it?
But then someone noticed some of the footage looked rather improbable, including camera angles that even the cinematographers working on Severance would struggle to pull off…
And then someone noticed a logo had been cropped out of later versions of the footage - the watermark of Doubao, an AI tool from the same company that owns Douyin & TikTok.
As per NBC:
“GetReal Labs, an AI-verification company founded by Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor and authority on image and video manipulation, told NBC News Friday that the company believed the first five seconds of the video were compiled using AI.
“We were able to extract a few frames and analyze them using our Inspect platform, and our models confirm that the images are synthetic,” GetReal Labs said, noting several other elements in the video differed from the rest of the footage.”
All the international news outlets covering this story have now taken down all of that video footage, while they investigate its authenticity.
Maybe this will turn out to be yet another disheartening cautionary tale about the influence of AI fakery in the mad scramble to go viral on social media. Or maybe Peng’s flight was entirely real, and he’s exactly as lucky as he claims he is (the suspect footage only appears in the first 5 seconds of the video, and now-deleted tracking data seems to back up his story), so instead, it’s an example of what a total pig’s ear an AI “enhancement” can make of your believability if you’re daft enough to fail to disclose using it.
But it certainly seems the Chinese authorities believe him:
“[Peng’s friend] Gu Zhimin posted a flight video without permission, which had a bad impact,” the report said. “He [meaning Peng] was grounded for six months and asked to write a report to deeply reflect on the negative impact of his behaviour.”
Yet there’s no question all this could have happened. Here’s why:
In 2007, Polish paraglider Ewa Wiśnierska was dragged upwards within a cumulonimbus storm all the way to a height of 9,947 metres (over 32,600 feet), passed out through lack of oxygen and then floated unconscious for up to an hour (BIG YIKES) until she encountered air that triggered her descent.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald:
“Wiśnierska says experience told her she had no chance of survival, but a doctor told her that blacking out had saved her.
"It was because that I got unconscious because then the heart slows down all the functions - it saved my life," she told ABC radio.”
🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶
So! Today, we’re talking about trolling - and we begin with the horror of my teenage years.
I have three stories I use to illustrate the quiet, bubbling madness of growing up in an East Yorkshire town in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
The first is recounting the time a friend went round to someone’s else house, and was asked by their host, with all the seriousness of the truly deranged:
“Can I make you a cup of tea? How would you like it: strong, weak, or just right?”
The second is a time I was meeting friends at my local pub, and I bumped into a colleague from the pottery I was working at. I hardly knew him because he’d only been there a few weeks, he always smelled powerfully of “incense” - at this point in my life I was too unworldly to recognise the cloying reek of weed - and I also remember he had some of the longest teeth I’ve ever seen on a person, as if one of his ancestors was a horse and he only just missed it this time round.
He pointed across to the table where his wife was taking off her coat, and leant towards me.
“That’s the missus. She likes you, she does.”
“Uh - tell her…thanks?
“No. She really likes you. And so do I.”
He followed this up with a toothy leer that would have given Hannibal Lecter nightmares. To this date I have never made my excuses and left a pub quicker (including the time I exited one through a window).
The third example, which took place in the same pub about five years after the Mr Very Friendly And His Very Friendly Wife incident, revolved around an extremely drunk middle-aged bloke who scowled at me across the bar, before calling very loudly:
“Hey, you! You four-eyed bastard.”
“I’m…I’m sorry?”
“You’re a four-eyed bastard.”
“Am I?”
“You’ve got four eyes, haven’t you?”
“I’m wearing glasses, if that’s what you mean?”
“Two and two is four. Four eyes. Can’t you count?”
“I see.”
“Where’s your dad then?”
“What? Well…he died a few years ago.”
“So you’re a bastard then!”
“I…don’t think that’s what “bastard” means?”
“What would you know, you four-eyed bastard?”
Thankfully my natural instincts kicked in, and I used a tactic that has served me well all my adult life: with an expression of cheerful, vacuous cluelessness, I raised my pint of Diet Coke to him & slackened my jaw to the point it threatened to fall off.
He looked at my gormless expression, muttered something about useless bastards and looked around the bar for a more suitable opponent/victim.
Shortly afterwards my friends arrived, and we retired to the back lounge to get on the important business of wondering what the absolute hell we were doing with our lives.
If you have a flair for sounding like an idiot and you enjoy using social media, I encourage you to develop this particular skill for self-defence purposes. Many casual trolls, the kind who do it as a part-time hobby on their tea-breaks rather than as a terribly wrongheaded calling they’ve dedicated themselves to with all the energy of the truly lost, they probably just want to feel superior, nursing that tiny squirt of dopamine that momentarily distracts from what really ails them - so if you let them feel like they won in an ironic fashion that’s obvious to everyone else, those trolls will probably go elsewhere.
Or: this is just me. Maybe you have to be a certain level of actual idiot for this to work. I don’t know. But I do know that since I started this newsletter and started using social media to market it, I’ve got pretty good at fending off trolls.
Obviously as a straight middle-aged English-speaking white man with a mediocre college degree, I’m a huge target. I kid, of course - I’m never going to receive anything more than a tiny fraction of the abuse that others get. (This makes the advice in the rest of this newsletter highly subjective indeed, if not plain useless. That’s a disclaimer.)
But fractionally offsetting all this is the sheer amount of time I’ve spent on social media, trying to get strangers interested in Everything Is Amazing. A big part of this newsletter’s growth over the last four years is down to me posting bite-sized versions of some of my stories onto social media, and being lucky enough for a few to go viral.
(As I argued in that piece: you will never, ever know what will take off, but you can make sure you’re always ready to capitalise on it when it does.)
Unfortunately, the more visible your work becomes, the more you get the attention of folk out to cause mischief - or something far, far worse.
If you already hate social media, I’m not here to persuade you out of it. If you’ve ever seen someone yell “you need to be on Twitter/Bluesky/[etc.]”, they’re wrong, you really don’t. This includes if you’re a writer - I know plenty who steer clear of all these platforms and apps, and they’re both happy and successful. They’re not wrong to be wary, either. Some of these services are set up in deeply problematic ways, and/or are run by problematic people, and even if they weren’t, life is too short to do something you hate. There’s always another way to do whatever these services can do for you. Go find it.
But social is also where a lot of people are - including the people who would disagree with you in exactly the right way, which is the subject of this new series I announced a while back:
Let's Agree To Disagree Better
Considering the fanatically polarised nature of so much in my social feeds right now, what could I learn - and pass along to you - about creating curious, mutually respectful conversations about even the most inflammatory topics, and maybe even helping change a few minds along the way? How do the professionals handle this stuff, and what can I borrow from them?
Unfortunately, trolls can immediately get in the way of all that. If someone’s acting out of bad faith (aka. the vast ecosystem of abusive interactions with strangers that we lump together under the term “trolling”), that carefully curious conversation hasn’t a hope of becoming anything except a fight. However polite, however much the word “debate” is thrown around, if at least one side is determined to make the other side “lose”, it’s a battle and not an exploratory discussion.
The disagreeing-better limited series will be just for paid subscribers - but I figured anything about avoiding trolls needs to be free, partly because this is my own highly subjective and therefore maybe semi-useless take on things.
Here’s my four-step process.
Rule 1: Count To (At Least) Ten
When you feel attacked, waves of hormones and neurotransmitters are released through your body, making you far more likely to react with intense anger or fear or some deeply upsetting cocktail of both…
But if someone has just said something completely insufferable to you, who cares? You can know all this and still not give a damn because you’re just so mad right now. (And people like me, spouting dispassionate, aloof and patronising-sounding commentary, are certainly not helping.) What you want to do is FIGHT BACK!
It is incredibly hard to keep a cool head in these moments. It’s hard in a way that’s difficult to explain to someone who isn’t spending a lot of time online, who doesn’t understand that these moments are a big deal and you’re not being over-dramatic.
Cue one of xkcd’s most famous cartoons:
The urge to correct or to skewer - and then get pulled into a shouting-match that obliterates your peace of mind for hours if not days - can be overwhelming. Or maybe instead you find yourself deleting the social media app from your phone, writing off humanity as a bloody terrible idea, shoddily implemented.
This is when I’m at my most stupid. When this happens, I can’t think straight. My brain is incapable of making any sensible decisions whatsoever, and while I know I should either do nothing or delegate my next actions to someone smarter (which in this moment is just about everybody), I still want to lash out. That’s how emotions work. Logic be damned.
Thankfully I have a rule. Rule Number 1. And since it’s as dumb as rocks it’s really easy to remember even at the worst of times, and it’s this:
Just count upwards to ten.
One….two…three….
Sometimes ten isn’t enough, and I’m finding the counting-upwards so relaxing and relieving that I want to count higher, so I indulge myself. Sixty seconds is enough time for true sanity to creep back in. Sometimes something more is required, like an hour’s walk, or a bit of rage-gardening.
But sometimes, just ten seconds is enough - so try giving it ten….
…and then maybe another ten, if you can spare it.
(I know this sounds trite and flavourless and maybe a bit boring. But maybe it’s another example of things that actually work that lack the attractive novelty of bizarre nonsense, which is another problem the internet has yet to solve.)
Rule 2: Bolster Your Nope
You hate trolls, right?
Okay! Then your job is to defy them.
Not to respond blindly out of anger or frustration, and not to be tricked into having your precious time squandered by them, bamboozled into giving away your attention and therefore your power - but to properly thwart them.
Up for that?
Good. Because genuine thwarting requires some forethought, a cool head and a bit of detective-work, as I’m about to explain.
Rule 3: What Do They Want?
A troll wants something from you, and they’re going to do their best to hide it.
It’s easy to look at someone’s nasty comment and think, Oh, they’re being such a JERK, and they’re WRONG, and now I’m going to CORRECT THEM while also making them look STUPID, haha that’ll show ‘em!!!!…
This is the trap that the worst trolls lay for us. The point is to provoke you into angrily lashing out in your replies, and the reward for this - the thing they really want from you - is usually the engagement of everyone that follows you. They just want access to your audience. They want them to watch you yelling at this troll, and to leap into the fray themselves.
If you have a thousand followers on a platform and the troll has just ten, and you choose to get into an argument with that troll, you’re giving them up to one hundred times the engagement reach they could ever generate on their own.
That’s what they really want from you.
The term for this is rage-baiting (or rage-farming), and it might be the most common form of trolling because it’s easy, it’s efficient (ie. useful to the lazy), and we all fall for it when we’re annoyed enough.
Then there’s sealioning, where someone hoses you with an unending torrent of questions while showing little or no inclination to properly engage with your answers.
(The perpetrator will usually call this a “debate”, and complain if you duck out, suggesting you’ve shown yourself to be morally spineless. That’s another way they get you.)
Most of the wannabe-trolling I have received is either rage-baiting or sealioning, and I think (I hope!) I’ve become pretty good at spotting both, via the following:
Check their feed. Do they post a lot of rage-baity stuff? And can you find examples of them doing to others what they seem to be doing to you?
Check their followers. Do they have a vanishingly small audience? Does that audience look spammy, when you click through to have a look?
Do they sound genuinely curious? This is a bit of a gut-instinct thing, but - do they really sound like they’re trying to understand more about the issue under discussion, or like they’re hunting for points to score against you?
The upshot of all of this should be that you now have a pretty good idea whether you’re being trolled or not. Hooray!
Now to finish them properly.
Rule 4: Give Them Nothing
Yep, you saw this coming. It’s “Don’t Feed The Trolls”.
The reason this is standard advice absolutely everywhere you look is that it’s often good advice, at least on an individual level. It doesn’t solve the wider problem of low-grade trolling - but it can solve it for you.
That’s why it’s the title of this report by the Center For Countering Digital Hate, which is free to download and a good read on the subject.
Nevertheless, we all still bite when we’re outraged enough. That leads to us getting more enraging nonsense in our social media feeds, because if there’s one thing algorithms are really good at, it’s looking at the stuff we’re most engaged with, and giving us even more of it. Hello human, based on your behaviour you clearly enjoy yelling at idiots, so here are twice as many idiots for you to yell at! You’re welcome, meatbag-friend!
The other reason we continue to bite is that refusing to feed the trolls feels…unsatisfying? There’s no big dopamine hit in ignoring someone. While it’s an intentional response, it feels like the absence of one. It’s like you’re letting them have the last word. It’s like (gggnnnn) they’ve won - and they might even tell you that, to try to reel you back in. (Ghaghhh.)
Thankfully, the next generation of post-Twitter social media platforms have an elegant new feature that can make you feel a lot better about leaving trolls twisting in the wind:
(That wasn’t a trolling comment, by the way - I’m just using it as an example.)
On both Threads and Bluesky, you can choose to “Hide [reply] for everyone” - which means that absolutely nobody except the troll will see that comment in your replies.
You banish them into a prison of their own making.
And the extra-fun side of this is that because the troll can still see that comment, but doesn’t know you hidden it, they’ll think nobody is engaging because everyone is ignoring them, which is a nice bit of positive feedback to send their way: ‘hey buddy, next time try not being a jerk and maybe someone will care?’
(You can even add to the fun by finding a catch-phrase to say out loud while you do it. Mine is “CLEAN-UP ON AISLE THREE!” I don’t know if this is actually funny or not. Ah well.)
All this feels *just* petty enough to be a satisfying reward for the part of your brain the internet has turned meaner, while still keeping you on the right side of what actually works. It can even turn starving trolls into a genuine pleasure! (Look, if you’re going to indulge your dark side, you can at least pick the right targets for it.)
Best of luck out there!
You can find me on Bluesky, Threads and Substack Notes, and not on Twitter/X.
Images: BBC News; Windmemories/Wikimedia; Dan Smedley; Stephanie Klepakie.
Love “Cleanup on aisle 3”!!!
Nice, Mike. I stew way too long over some inane trolling on my turf, and since I'm now writing mostly on Substack, I put their filter in the way: new commenters must be approved. Solved my troll issue immediately (though still a bit unclear to me if banning removes their comment from everyone's eyes or only mine…). The restaurant side piece was a hoot!