You post something you’re proud of. A few minutes later, a stranger shows up in the comments to tell you it’s stupid, you’re ugly, and nobody asked.
It stings. Of course it does.
Comment sections have been rough since the days of message boards and early blogs, but the scale is different now. One post can reach thousands of people you’ve never met, and a few of them will show up mainly to be cruel. You can’t control that. You can control how much of it reaches you, how you respond (if you respond at all), and how quickly you get back to your life.
Below are 20 ways to do that. Each one is backed by research, survey data or a real case. Some are about the hater. Most are about you.
1. Remember you’re not the only target
When hate lands in your notifications, it can feel personal and strangely singular. As if the internet picked you.
It didn’t. Ofcom’s Online Nation 2025 report, published in December 2025, found that 37% of UK adults had seen something upsetting online in the previous four weeks, up from 31% a year earlier. In the same June 2025 survey, a third (33%) had come across offensive language and just over a quarter (26%) had seen hateful or discriminatory content. Social media was where most of those encounters happened: 59% said their most recent run-in with something harmful was on a social platform.
Those numbers don’t make the comment you got any nicer. They do change the story you tell yourself about it. “This happens to a huge chunk of people who post anything” is a far easier thought to carry than “something about me attracts this.”
Start small: the next time a nasty comment arrives, say to yourself, “This is a common internet thing, not a me thing,” and see whether the sting fades a little faster.
2. Remember who’s actually typing
There’s a reason the old advice about “it’s about them, not you” keeps coming back. Personality research supports it.
A 2025 meta-analysis by Sergio Hidalgo-Fuentes, Elisa González-Pérez and Isabel Martínez-Álvarez, published in Psicothema, pooled 24 studies from 11 countries covering 14,044 participants. The meta-analysis on trolling and Dark Tetrad traits found that all four traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy and sadism) were positively linked to a greater tendency to troll, and the authors found no sign of publication bias. One honest caveat: these are correlations. Not every troll is a sadist, and plenty of people with prickly personalities never post a mean word.
Still, the overall pattern is useful. A good chunk of online cruelty says more about the sender’s disposition than about the quality of your photo, your opinion or your face. If you’ve ever dealt with someone like this face to face, the strategies for dealing with egomaniacs carry over surprisingly well to the comment section.
Picture this: someone leaves “lol imagine thinking this is good” under your painting. Instead of asking “Is my painting bad?”, you ask “What kind of person goes out of their way to type that?” The second question is usually the more accurate one, so make it the one you ask first.
3. Don’t mistake the loud few for a crowd
Five nasty replies can feel like the whole internet has turned on you. A December 2025 study suggests your brain is miscounting.
In a study published in PNAS Nexus in December 2025, Angela Lee, Eric Neumann, Jamil Zaki and Jeffrey Hancock asked 1,090 American adults to estimate how many Reddit users post highly toxic comments. The average guess was 43%. Prior research puts the real figure closer to 3%, which means people overestimated toxic commenters roughly 13-fold. Estimates for Facebook misinformation were similarly off (47% guessed versus about 8.5% in existing research).
| What people were asked about | Average estimate | Figure in prior research |
|---|---|---|
| Reddit users posting highly toxic comments | 43% | about 3% |
| Facebook users sharing false news | 47% | about 8.5% |
The part I find most encouraging: when participants were shown the accurate numbers, they felt more optimistic and less worried about society’s moral decline. Correcting the math changed the mood.
So the next time a thread fills with hate, remember that a tiny, highly active group can produce a lot of noise. If you notice yourself spiraling into “everyone hates me” territory, the techniques in how to stop catastrophizing will help.
A quick experiment: after your next post, count every account that engaged with it, then count the hostile ones. Write down the ratio. It’s usually far smaller than it feels.
4. Expect it to sting more than praise feels good
Fifty kind comments, one cruel one. Guess which you’ll still be thinking about at midnight.
That isn’t weakness. It’s how attention works. In a 2025 experiment in Scientific Reports, Y. Ai and A. von Mühlenen randomly assigned 129 adults to read 40 blog comments that were positive, neutral or negative. On a four-point anxiety scale, the negative group averaged 2.42, compared with 1.77 for neutral and 1.55 for positive, a large difference by the study’s own measure. Mood dropped too. Participants under 35 reported more anxiety than older ones. The comments were AI-generated and the sample was small and mostly Western, so treat it as one solid data point rather than the final word.
Knowing this ahead of time helps more than you’d think. When you expect a bad comment to hit hard, you stop reading the hurt as proof that the comment is true. It’s just your nervous system doing its job a little too well. And if the comment keeps replaying for hours, these ways to stop ruminating thoughts can break the loop.
Next time, do this: when one negative comment grabs you, scroll back up and deliberately reread three positive ones. You’re not ignoring the bad one. You’re correcting the weighting.
5. Put a gap between reading and replying
Think about the first 30 seconds after you read a hateful comment. Your heart rate goes up. Your thinking narrows. You draft a reply that feels brilliant and devastating, and it’s often neither.
The mechanism is fairly simple. A strong emotional jolt pushes you toward fast, reactive responses. A fast reply is more likely to be heated. A heated reply gives the hater exactly the reaction they were fishing for, and it also gives the platform a back-and-forth to show more people. Each step feeds the next. Adding a delay breaks the chain at step one, before arousal turns into action.
There’s some evidence that even a tiny pause changes behavior. In a 2021 preprint, Matthew Katsaros, Kathy Yang and Lauren Fratamico analyzed Twitter’s prompts that asked users to reconsider potentially offensive replies before posting. Prompted users posted 6% fewer offensive tweets than a control group, and also received fewer offensive replies afterward. The paper wasn’t peer-reviewed and it’s several years old, but the logic holds: a moment of friction gives the calmer part of your brain time to catch up. The same principle shows up in how to deal with angry people offline.
Your move: set a personal rule of no replies to hostile comments for at least an hour. If you still want to respond after that, you’ll at least be responding on purpose.
6. Give them nothing to push against
“Don’t feed the trolls” is old internet wisdom. A large 2025 study backs it up, with one twist.
Yukun Yang, Robin Lange, Yidi Zhang and Joseph Walther looked at roughly 1,000 hateful posts on the platform Gab and then tracked more than 1.2 million later posts by the same users. Their findings, published in December 2025 in New Media & Society, were striking: posts that got no response were followed by less toxicity in the short term. Getting dislikes did the opposite. Dislikes increased the hatefulness of the poster’s next post and of their posts over the following three months.
The twist is that likes and affirming replies also reduced toxicity in the short term, which the authors say doesn’t fit neatly with existing theories. That’s a reminder that this is one platform and observational data, not a controlled experiment. For you as the target, though, the practical takeaway is clear. Angry pushback, downvotes and dunks seem to fuel some haters. Silence doesn’t.
It also takes a certain kind of steadiness to let a comment sit there unanswered. If you want practice, a few of these Stoic exercises are basically training for exactly this moment.
The cheapest response is nothing at all. Leave it, close the app, and let the comment die without an audience.
7. See the audience behind the troll
It’s tempting to picture a hater as one angry person shouting at you. Often, they’re performing for someone else.
Joe Walther, a Distinguished Professor of Communication at UC Santa Barbara and a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, describes online hate as a communication process rather than just a personality trait. In a May 2025 profile from UCSB’s Division of Social Sciences, he explained that a lot of online hate comes from organized, collective activity, and that hate posters reward one another with likes and affirming replies. He was also candid that research hasn’t settled whether objecting to a hateful message makes posters back off or push harder.
That framing changes what a reply to you even means. You’re not in a debate. You’re the backdrop for someone’s bid for approval from their own crowd.
Say you post a recipe and someone writes a sneering comment about your accent in the video. Ten minutes later, three accounts with the same kind of username like it. That isn’t feedback on your cooking. It’s a little in-group ritual happening on your post. If you notice you’re tempted to win their approval back, how to stop seeking attention from others is worth a read.
Test it this week: when a hateful comment appears, click on the profiles that liked it. If they look like a little club, treat the comment as their in-joke, not your problem.
8. Don’t fight toxic with toxic
There’s a satisfying fantasy where you reply with something so savage the hater deletes their account. The problem is what that reply does to you.
Toxicity spreads. When you engage hostile content in its own tone, you absorb its tone. Your next post gets sharper, your replies get colder, and slowly your corner of the internet starts to feel like theirs. It works like a feedback loop: exposure raises your own hostility, your hostility draws more of the same, and the cycle tightens.
A field experiment from the University of Warwick’s CAGE research centre backs up the first link in that chain. George Beknazar-Yuzbashev, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, Jesse McCrosky and Mateusz Stalinski gave 742 US social media users a browser extension that hid toxic content on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for six weeks, cutting their exposure by about 71%. The toxicity of those users’ own posts dropped by 30% on Facebook and 27% on Twitter. It’s a working paper (first released January 2025, revised June 2026), so it hasn’t completed peer review yet, but the authors’ reading is plain: toxicity is contagious.
Here’s a simple way in: before you post any reply to a hater, read it as if your boss, your grandmother and your future self were all reading it too. If any of them would wince, delete it.
9. Sort critics from haters
Not every negative comment is hate. Some of it is useful, even if it’s delivered badly.
Think of a restaurant. A diner who says “the pasta was oversalted” is giving the chef something to work with. A diner who yells at the chef about his haircut is not. Both are negative. Only one is about the food. The comparison has limits, though. Online, a lot of comments mix the two, and a genuine critic can still be rude.
The good news is that you’re probably better at telling them apart than you give yourself credit for. In the 2025 PNAS Nexus study by Lee and colleagues, participants did well on a signal detection task: when shown actual posts, most people correctly identified the toxic ones. Their problem was overestimating how common toxicity is, not spotting it. So the sorting skill is there. You just have to use it on purpose instead of letting every negative comment land in the same bucket.
This is really an emotional intelligence skill. Separating “this hurts” from “this is wrong” is easier once you’ve worked on improving your EQ.
Give it a go: for each critical comment, ask whether it’s about your work or about you as a person. Keep the first kind and learn from it. Let the second go.
10. If you answer, answer once
Sometimes silence feels wrong. Maybe the comment spreads a false claim about you, or your audience is watching to see what you’ll do. If you’re going to reply, how you do it matters.
A pre-registered field experiment on X by Dominik Bär, Abdurahman Maarouf and Stefan Feuerriegel of LMU Munich, released as a preprint in November 2024, tested different kinds of replies on 2,664 accounts that had posted hateful content. Short, generic messages warning about the consequences of hate speech reduced the number of hateful posts those users made over the next two weeks by about one post on average, compared with no reply. Generic empathy messages didn’t produce a significant drop. AI-generated replies tailored to the specific post were ineffective and, the authors warn, may even backfire.
It’s a preprint and a single study, and the replies came from researchers, not from the people being attacked. But it points somewhere sensible. A brief, calm, generic statement beats a long, personalized argument.
So write one short reply, something like “This breaks the community rules and I’ve reported it,” and then stop. No second round, no matter what comes back.
11. Hide the worst before you ever see it
You don’t have to read every comment to protect yourself from it. Football’s governing body now filters abuse for thousands of players so they don’t have to.
FIFA launched its Social Media Protection Service around the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, and since 2024 all 211 of its member associations and their players have had access. The service scans public accounts belonging to players, teams and officials, automatically hides abusive replies (where the account owner consents), and reports serious cases to the platforms. In figures released in November 2025, FIFA said it had analyzed 33 million posts and comments across 15,302 accounts, hidden more than 10 million abusive comments from public view, and flagged over 30,000 posts to platforms in 2025 alone. Eleven people across seven countries were referred to police that year, and FIFA confirmed for the first time that highly abusive individuals would be blocked from buying tickets to its events.
You don’t have FIFA’s budget, but you have a smaller version of the same tools. Most major platforms let you filter comments containing words or phrases you choose and hide them automatically. Some let you limit replies to people you follow.
Start small: open your privacy settings today and add ten words or slurs you never want to see under your posts. It takes five minutes and works while you sleep.
12. Report it, but don’t wait on it
Reporting matters. It creates a record, it can get accounts removed, and it helps platforms see patterns. Just don’t hang your peace of mind on it.
Back to Ofcom’s 2025 data: about 60% of UK adults who came across harmful content took some kind of action, yet only 35% reported or flagged it, while 40% did nothing at all. Platform tools don’t always give people much reason to bother. In a May 2026 paper in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, Victoria Zhong and colleagues at NYU and Columbia interviewed 19 YouTube creators about harassment. The paper’s title sums up the mood: the report button is “just for decoration.” Creators said they couldn’t rely on reporting for any real remedy and leaned instead on moderation tools, careful management of their exposure, and support from other creators. It’s a small qualitative study, so it describes experiences rather than measuring how often reports work.
That’s the balance to aim for. Report, because it’s free and sometimes effective, and then move on as though nothing will come of it.
Next time, do this: report the comment, block the account, and close the app. Don’t check back to see whether the platform acted.
13. Mute, block and restrict without guilt
Plenty of people hesitate to block. It feels petty, or like admitting the hater got to you. Drop that idea. These tools exist for exactly this.
PEN America, the free-expression nonprofit, built its Online Harassment Field Manual for writers and journalists who deal with abuse. It’s practical about how each tool works: blocking stops an account from contacting or following you, muting hides their content from your view, and reporting asks the platform to step in. It’s also honest about the trade-offs. Blocking can occasionally provoke someone into escalating, and muting can hide a real threat you’d want to track. For heavier harassment, the manual suggests asking a trusted friend to monitor your mentions and help you file reports, so you don’t have to read everything yourself.
Many platforms also offer a softer “restrict” option, where the person can still comment but only they see it. That’s handy when blocking might start a fight you don’t need.
Your move: pick the tool that fits each case. Annoying, mute. Abusive, block. Threatening, keep a record before you block (see item 15).
14. Change how much you see, not whether you’re online
When the comments get ugly, quitting social media entirely can feel like the only option. The data suggests a more targeted approach.
UK adults spent an average of 4 hours and 30 minutes online per day outside of work in 2025, ten minutes more than the year before, according to Ofcom’s Online Nation 2025. Only 29% said being online had a positive effect on their mental health, down from 33% in 2024. That’s a lot of hours for something fewer people feel good about.
But full breaks don’t seem to fix it. A March 2025 meta-analysis in Scientific Reports by Laura Lemahieu and colleagues pooled 10 studies with 4,674 participants and found that social media abstinence had no significant effect on positive mood, negative mood or life satisfaction. The authors concluded that “temporarily stepping away from social media may not be the most optimal approach” to improving well-being. The included studies varied in method, so take it as “not proven,” not “doesn’t work for anyone.”
What’s left is curating: fewer notifications, less time in your mentions, more time on the parts of the internet you actually enjoy. That’s the core idea behind digital minimalism.
A quick experiment: turn off comment notifications for a week and check replies just once a day at a set time. Notice whether hate feels smaller when it arrives in one batch instead of a steady drip.
15. Screenshot everything
If the harassment is repeated, threatening or coordinated, start keeping evidence now. Not later, when you need it.
The Cyber Helpline, a UK charity that supports people targeted online, makes “document everything” one of its first steps for anyone facing online harassment. Its guide recommends capturing each abusive message along with the profile page it came from, either by screenshot or printing. The reason is practical: if the person deletes their posts or their account, your copy is what remains, and it’s what police or platforms will ask for if things escalate. The guide also says to call emergency services straight away if you feel your physical safety is under immediate threat.
There’s a small psychological bonus here too. Logging a comment turns you from someone being attacked into someone collecting facts. That shift alone can lower the temperature.
Create a folder called “Evidence” on your phone, and every time something crosses the line, screenshot it with the date visible before you block or delete anything.
16. Let your people back you up
You don’t have to fight every battle alone, and both a real campaign and a 2024 experiment suggest it works better when you don’t.
In 2016, Swedish journalist Mina Dennert started replying to xenophobic comments on Facebook and soon recruited friends and colleagues to help. The effort became #jagärhär (“I am here”), and the wider #iamhere network has since grown to more than 150,000 members across 16 national Facebook groups, according to the Dangerous Speech Project. Members find hateful comment threads under news articles, post calm, fact-based replies, and then like each other’s comments. Because Facebook ranks comments by engagement, those replies rise to the top and the hate sinks out of view. Catherine Buerger’s 2021 ethnographic study in Social Media + Society found the group wasn’t mainly trying to change the haters’ minds. It was trying to reduce the hate’s impact and reach the “movable middle” reading along.
Lab research points the same way. In two experiments published in February 2024 in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Jimena Zapata, Justin Sulik, Clemens von Wulffen and Ophelia Deroy found that a single bystander objecting to hate speech didn’t change how harmful participants judged it. Collective, unanimous opposition did. One voice is easy to dismiss. A chorus sets a norm.
Test it this week: ask two or three people you trust to reply supportively, or just like the kind comments, the next time you get piled on. Return the favor when it happens to them.
17. Talk to someone offline
Online hate tends to isolate people. The fix is often embarrassingly simple: tell someone who loves you.
A longitudinal study by Michelle Wright of Indiana State University, published in August 2024 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, followed 463 eighth graders in Beijing and 445 in Chicago for a year. Among teens who were cyberbullied, those who felt more supported by their parents showed a weaker link between the bullying and later depression, physical health complaints and self-harm. Support from friends had a similar buffering effect, more strongly in the American sample. These were teenagers, the data was self-reported, and there were only two time points, so it doesn’t prove that support causes better outcomes in adults. But the direction fits what most of us know intuitively.
Saying “someone online was horrible to me today” out loud to a real person takes away some of its power. Their reaction (“that’s ridiculous, ignore them”) is usually more grounded than anything in your own head. If opening up feels awkward, these tips on how to have a good conversation can make it easier.
Here’s a simple way in: next time a comment gets under your skin, text a friend a screenshot with “can you believe this?” Their reply will probably put it back in proportion within minutes.
18. Know when it becomes a crime
Most hate is just ugly. Some of it is illegal. Knowing where that line sits lets you act instead of just enduring.
In the UK, the Online Safety Act created new criminal offences that took effect on 31 January 2024, including threatening communications, sending false information intended to cause harm, cyberflashing, intimate image abuse, encouraging serious self-harm and “epilepsy trolling” (sending flashing images to someone with epilepsy). According to the UK government’s official explainer, there have already been convictions for cyberflashing and threatening communications. The Act also requires platforms to remove illegal content when users flag it, with Ofcom able to enforce those duties since 17 March 2025. Other countries have their own laws, so check what applies where you live.
People are increasingly using these routes. UN Women’s April 2026 Tipping Point report found that the share of women journalists reporting online violence to police doubled from 11% in 2020 to 22% in 2025.
Do this today: look up the online harassment or threatening communications law in your country, and save your local police non-emergency contact in your phone. If a message threatens violence, report it, using the evidence from item 15.
19. Treat yourself like a friend would
After a nasty comment, there’s often a second wave of hate, and it comes from you. “Why did I post that?” “I should have known better.” “Maybe they’re right.”
Self-compassion interrupts that second wave, and newer research is starting to test it directly with people targeted online. In a paper published in September 2026 in Acta Psychologica Sinica, Tomoko Kishimoto, Ximing Hao and colleagues from Beijing Normal, Nankai and Peking universities ran two studies with cyberbullying victims. In the first, a randomized study with 59 participants, guided dialogues built around self-esteem and self-compassion (delivered through a large language model) improved psychological resilience. A second study with 105 participants found the self-compassion dialogue directly improved resilience and was tied to changes in feelings of isolation. The samples were small, and the authors call it preliminary evidence. It’s early, but it gives a real basis for the idea that kindness toward yourself helps you recover rather than making you soft.
If your inner voice gets especially harsh after an online attack, this guide on how to stop hating yourself goes deeper.
Give it a go: write down what you’d say to a friend who got the same comment. Then read it back to yourself, slowly, as if it were addressed to you.
20. Keep posting
This one is the hardest. The quiet goal of a lot of online hate is to make you stop.
It often works. UN Women’s April 2026 report Tipping Point, based on a 2025 survey of 641 people in 119 countries, found that self-censorship online among journalists and media workers rose from 30% in 2020 to 45% in 2025. Across all respondents, including writers and human rights defenders, 41% said they now self-censor online. The toll goes beyond silence: about 24.7% of the journalists and media workers surveyed had been diagnosed with or treated for anxiety or depression, and almost 13% had been diagnosed with PTSD. That’s a specific, high-exposure group, but it shows clearly where unchecked abuse leads.
Every time you post anyway, you refuse that outcome. You don’t have to be loud or defiant about it. Just keep showing up with the work, the opinions and the jokes you’d share if nobody were waiting to sneer. If the hate has started to feed a bigger fear that you don’t belong online at all, read up on imposter syndrome. It’s often the same voice in a different outfit.
Post the next thing on your list this week, on schedule, and resist the urge to soften it in advance for an audience of critics who were never going to like it anyway.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. You’ll reply at 1 a.m. with something you regret. You’ll spend 40 minutes reading a hate thread about yourself. You’ll let one comment wreck a whole weekend.
That’s normal, and how you treat yourself afterward matters more than the slip itself. In a study published in Appetite in 2023, Charlotte Hagerman and colleagues at Drexel University tracked 140 people in a weight-loss program through smartphone check-ins several times a day. When participants responded to a lapse with more self-compassion, they reported better mood and better self-control over the following hours. It’s a different setting and an observational design, so it shows an association rather than proof. The lesson still transfers: the hours after a slip go better when you meet it with kindness instead of a lecture.
So if you snapped back at a troll, delete the reply if you want, and don’t spend another hour replaying it. If you doomscrolled your mentions, close the app and do something with your hands. Then pick up from the item on this list that feels easiest right now. These steps for turning a bad day around can help when one rough online moment threatens to swallow the whole day.
One slip doesn’t undo everything else you’ve practiced. It’s just a slip.
Conclusion
Haters on social media aren’t going away. Most of them are a small, loud group with their own reasons for being there, and the research is fairly consistent that you don’t owe them your attention, your energy or a reply.
What you do owe yourself is protection. Filter what you can, block without guilt, keep receipts when things turn serious, lean on the people in your corner, and keep making the things you set out to make.
Pick two items from this list and try them this week. Muting notifications and adding a word filter are good places to begin. For more on building the kind of inner steadiness that makes comments land softer, take a look around our self-improvement guides.
