I’ve been gang-attacked on Facebook, buried on YouTube, and harassed on LinkedIn

I once made a comment on Facebook that triggered a gang attack. Within hours, hundreds of people I’d never interacted with were piling on. They screenshotted the thread and shared it think before you post. The comments were vicious — not disagreements, not criticism, just pure hostility from strangers who wanted to destroy someone they’d never met. I deleted the thread after about a hundred comments. It didn’t matter. The damage was already done, and the screenshots were already circulating.

That wasn’t my only experience. I posted a YouTube video that got downvoted into oblivion and flooded with hostile comments. I turned off comments entirely. On LinkedIn, I’ve received attacks that had nothing to do with the content and everything to do with someone wanting to start a fight. I block immediately now. No engagement, no response, no second chances.

For years, belly dancer friends who knew my photography work came to me for advice when they got attacked online. Dozens of them, dealing with everything from cruel comments about their appearance to coordinated harassment campaigns. The pattern was always the same: someone posts something, a mob forms, the target is overwhelmed, and the platform does nothing useful.

Online hostility is not new. It’s been part of internet culture since Usenet in the 1990s, when the practice was called “flaming.” What’s changed is the scale. A flame war on a Usenet newsgroup in 1997 involved maybe twenty people. A Facebook pile-on in 2025 can involve hundreds or thousands, and the screenshots ensure it follows you after you delete it.

The Difference Between Criticism and an Attack

Criticism says “this argument doesn’t hold up because of X.” An attack says “you’re garbage and everything you produce is garbage.” Criticism engages with the work. An attack targets the person. The distinction matters because writers need criticism to improve and need to recognize attacks for what they are — someone else’s problem projected onto your screen.

The hardest part is that attacks sometimes arrive disguised as criticism. Someone starts with a legitimate-sounding objection and then escalates into personal insults, or they use a reasonable tone to say something designed to undermine your confidence rather than improve your work. Learning to distinguish between the two takes experience, and the learning process is unpleasant.

Why It Happens

Online anonymity removes consequences. In person, saying something vicious to a stranger gets you a confrontation, a reputation, or worse. Online, it gets you likes from other people who enjoy watching someone get torn apart. The feedback loop rewards cruelty. The more vicious the comment, the more attention it gets, and attention is the currency of every platform.

Mob behavior compounds the problem. Once a pile-on starts, people join in not because they care about the original content but because attacking someone who’s already being attacked is socially safe within that group. It costs nothing and earns approval from the mob. The target isn’t a person to them. The target is an opportunity to perform outrage for an audience.

Writers are particularly vulnerable because the work is personal. A plumber who gets a bad review can shrug it off as a business matter. A writer who gets attacked feels it in their identity because writing comes from who you are, not just what you do. Attackers know this instinctively, which is why they go for the person rather than the work.

What Actually Works

Block immediately. Don’t read the comment twice. Don’t craft a response. Don’t try to reason with someone who came to fight. Block and move on. Every second you spend reading hostile comments is a second the attacker wins. I block anyone who crosses the line, first offense, no warnings. The block button is the single most useful tool on every platform.

Don’t engage. Engagement is what attackers want. A response — any response — gives them material for the next round. Even a calm, reasonable reply gets screenshotted, stripped of context, and used to escalate. Silence is the only response that costs them something, because it denies them the reaction they came for.

Delete when necessary. I deleted that Facebook thread and I’d do it again. Some people will tell you that deleting shows weakness. Those people haven’t been on the receiving end of a coordinated pile-on. Deleting a thread that’s become a magnet for hostility isn’t retreat. It’s refusing to provide a platform for abuse.

Turn off comments when necessary. My YouTube video comments are off. The video is still up. The content still reaches people. The comments section was contributing nothing except a venue for anonymous hostility. Removing it was the right call.

Keep records. Screenshot the worst of it before you delete or block. If the harassment escalates to threats or crosses legal lines, you’ll want documentation. You probably won’t need it. But if you do, you’ll be glad you have it.

Talk to people who’ve been through it. When my belly dancer friends came to me after getting attacked, the most useful thing I could do wasn’t strategy — it was telling them they weren’t alone and they weren’t crazy for being upset. Online attacks are designed to make you feel isolated. Talking to someone who understands breaks that isolation.

The Ultimate Flame: An Internet Artifact

Before social media turned online hostility into a mass participation sport, the art of the internet flame was almost a literary form. The most famous example is “The Ultimate Flame” by Guy Macon, posted to a Usenet newsgroup on October 20, 1997. It’s been copied, shared, and adapted across the internet for nearly thirty years.

It’s worth reading not because it’s a model for behavior — it absolutely isn’t — but because it captures a specific moment in internet history when hostility was performative and almost comedic, before it became the coordinated weapon it is today. The full text is below.

You swine. You vulgar little maggot. Don’t you know that you are pathetic? You worthless bag of filth. As we say in Texas, I’ll bet you couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won’t go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you.

You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you. You are a bloody nardless newbie twit protohominid chromosomally aberrant caricature of a coprophagic cloacal parasitic pond scum and I wish you would go away.

You’re a putrescence mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.

You are a bleating fool, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?

If you aren’t an idiot, you made a world-class effort at simulating one. Try to edit your writing of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.

You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs.

You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You’re a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won’t have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.

And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake?

You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper.

On a good day you’re a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.

I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I’m sorry. I can’t go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don’t have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half-baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh.

The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. I have snipped away most of what you wrote, because, well… it didn’t really say anything. Your attempt at constructing a creative flame was pitiful. I mean, really, stringing together a bunch of insults among a load of babbling was hardly effective… Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us “normal” people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are “challenged” persons in this world who find these things more difficult. If I had known that this was your case, then I would have never read your post. It just wouldn’t have been “right”. Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you.

P.S.: You are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal, fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame, self-righteous, Byzantine, conspiratorial, satanic, fraudulent, libelous, bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative, paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical, cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim, crazy, weird, dystopic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, abrasive, poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive, abusive, socially-retarded, puerile, clueless, and generally Not Good.

I Hope This Helps…

[The first known post was by Guy Macon, 10/20/97]