How to Handle Bullying

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Online bullying often masquerades as conviction or playful competition.

Everyday cruelty online thrives in anonymity and crowd mentality.

Bullying patterns develop subtly, often unnoticed until ingrained.

Most people who behave cruelly online do not think of themselves as cruel, and in fact may not be especially so. Subjectively, they may be speaking from a sense of conviction, righteousness, or simply what feels like playful competition.

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As a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst active online and in my work, I have spent years watching and being directly impacted by how ordinary people account for harm they cause—usually, they feel they are in the right. Often, they believe they are doing what is best. Sometimes, there is a tinge of enjoyment, especially if justified and rationalized ethically and morally. Some days, going online feels like a risky proposition, particularly if one of the more persistent low-level proto-trolls has latched on to some idea. How to handle that, I've discussed in my work on BRODA, a common set of moves on socials: bait, refuse open dialogue, attack. There is often a theme of the alleged troll expressing being victimized, falsely accused, shifting to a personal register, flipping blame (DARVO), and the like.

Wrongdoing more generally was once imagined to be the work of a few deviants, evil people. After WWII, when perfectly lovely neighbors turned a blind eye, or worse, the explanation became less clear, more troubling, and easy to ignore. More people than we'd like to imagine, under conditions like anonymity, can slip into everyday evil: given a crowd, perceived distance from the target, and a cause that makes the attack feel like justice. Famous mid-20th-century experiments paint a clearer portrait—Milgram's obedience studies, Zimbardo's prison simulation, contested as they now are, pointed at the same uncomfortable thing. The numbers do as well. This type of behavior is context-dependent, and people who think they'd never act so are often surprised, or they don't notice... even when confronted with the facts.

Pathological narcissism is relatively uncommon, hovering between 1% and 6% of people, depending on the study. The darker traits it travels with—manipulation, callousness, the appetite for others' pain—are more rare, shading off into a thin tail rather than marking out a population. Even granting the occasional claim that a third of online trolls score high on those traits, the sheer volume of everyday cruelty online isn't exclusively coming from those folks.

A consistent pattern of behaving this way rarely arrives all at once. It sets in by degrees, the way some diseases do—a symptom here, easily explained away, then another, until one day the realization breaches. A history of being victimized, perhaps; personality traits like narcissism and neuroticism, not fully set but predisposing; the more anonymous, detached perch social media affords, and the........

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