There is a particular kind of cruelty that the internet has perfected, and it does not require a single person to throw the first punch. It requires a crowd. It requires everyone in that crowd to decide, one by one, that this is not their problem. That speaking up is too risky. That the person being targeted probably did something to deserve it, or at least that they cannot be sure enough to say otherwise.

That is how a dogpile works. Not through the aggression of a few bad actors, but through the silence of everyone else.

What a Dogpile Actually Looks Like

We tend to imagine online abuse as something that happens between an attacker and a target. That framing is wrong, and it lets most of the people involved off the hook.

A dogpile is a collective event. Someone (a public figure, a journalist, a private person who said something that caught the wrong attention) becomes the subject of coordinated or semi-coordinated attack. Hundreds or thousands of people pile on within hours. The messages range from pointed criticism to explicit threats. The target's name trends. Screenshots circulate. Old posts get dug up and reframed. Employers get tagged. Family members get contacted.

And surrounding all of that, in far greater numbers than the attackers, are the watchers. People who see what is happening, recognize it as disproportionate or outright wrong, and say nothing.

Some of them are afraid. Some of them have been through it themselves and know the cost of stepping into the line of fire. Some of them have simply decided that it is not their fight.

I understand all of those calculations. I have made some of them myself. But I want to be honest about what they add up to.

Silence Is Not Neutral

There is a version of this conversation that treats silence as a passive choice, the absence of action rather than an action itself. That framing is comfortable, but it is not accurate.

When someone is being publicly destroyed and the people around them say nothing, that silence communicates something. It tells the target that no one is coming. It tells the attackers that the crowd is not going to push back. It tells everyone watching that this is acceptable, that this is just how things work online, and the person being targeted should have known better than to exist publicly.

Silence, in the context of a mob, is permission.

That is not a moral judgment about any individual person who has ever stayed quiet. It is a structural observation about how these events function. The mob does not need active participation from the majority. It needs the majority to stand aside. And the majority almost always does.

What It Does to the People Being Targeted

I have spoken with people who have been through serious online campaigns against them. The details vary. The pattern does not.

What breaks people is not usually the worst message they receive. It is the volume. It is the duration. It is the realization, which sets in somewhere around hour six or day three, that no one is going to make it stop. That the people who know them, who have worked with them, who have publicly associated themselves with them, are quiet. That the institutions they are part of have gone silent. That they are, in the most practical sense, alone.

That aloneness is manufactured. It is the product of thousands of individual decisions to stay out of it. And it does real damage: to mental health, to careers, to people's willingness to ever speak publicly again. Some people never come back from it. They leave platforms, leave professions, leave public life entirely. The mob does not just hurt them in the moment. It removes them.

That is a loss. Not just for the individual, but for the conversations they would have contributed to, the work they would have done, the perspectives that go unheard because the cost of having them became too high.

The Bystander Effect, Amplified

Social psychologists have studied the bystander effect for decades. The core finding is counterintuitive: the more people who witness an emergency, the less likely any individual is to intervene. Diffusion of responsibility. Everyone assumes someone else will handle it.

Online environments amplify this dynamic in ways that make it almost structurally guaranteed. The audience is invisible and enormous. The social cost of speaking up is real and immediate. You can become a secondary target within minutes. The platforms themselves are designed to surface conflict and reward engagement, which means the mob gets amplified while measured responses get buried.

And unlike a physical emergency, which has a clear endpoint, an online campaign can last for days or weeks. The bystander effect does not just apply to the moment of crisis. It applies to every hour of it.

What Speaking Up Actually Requires

I am not going to tell you that speaking up is easy or without cost. It is not. People who have publicly defended targets of online mobs have become targets themselves. That is real, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either naive or has never actually done it.

But there is a range of what speaking up can look like, and most of it does not require putting yourself in the center of the storm.

It can mean sending a private message to the person being targeted to tell them you see what is happening and you are sorry. It can mean not amplifying content that is clearly part of a pile-on, even when the framing makes it look like legitimate criticism. It can mean, when you have a platform, saying clearly that what you are watching is disproportionate, not defending every choice the target has ever made, but naming the mob for what it is.

It can mean, when the dust settles, not treating the person who survived it as radioactive. Not quietly distancing yourself because association with them feels risky. Not letting the mob's verdict become the permanent record.

These are not heroic acts. They are the minimum of what it means to be a decent participant in public life.

Why This Matters Beyond the Individual

Every person who is successfully destroyed online sends a message to everyone watching about what happens when you speak up, report on something powerful, advocate for something unpopular, or simply exist in a way that attracts the wrong attention.

That message is: this could happen to you, and no one will help.

That message shapes behavior. It shapes what journalists will cover, what advocates will say publicly, what ordinary people will post. It creates a chilling effect that does not require any formal censorship, just the demonstrated willingness of crowds to destroy individuals and the demonstrated unwillingness of bystanders to intervene.

The people who run these campaigns understand this. The silence of bystanders is not a side effect of what they do. It is the goal.

You Do Not Have to Be a Hero

I am not asking anyone to charge into a mob alone. I am asking people to be honest with themselves about what their silence costs, not just to the person being targeted, but to the kind of public discourse we are all trying to participate in.

If you have watched someone get destroyed online and said nothing, I am not here to condemn you. I have been there. The calculation is real.

But I think we need to stop pretending that staying quiet is a neutral act. It is a choice. And like all choices, it has consequences for the people we leave alone in the middle of it, and for the culture we are collectively building every time we decide that this is just how things work.

It does not have to work this way. But it will keep working this way until more of us decide it should not.

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Get Involved

If you believe in defending people who are being targeted unfairly online journalists, advocates, private individuals caught in the crossfire I want to hear from you.

The work I do through Defend the Truth is built on the premise that silence is a choice and that choosing otherwise matters. Whether you want to support that work financially, share it with people who need to see it, or simply show up when someone in your own community is being targeted all of it counts.

Visit the Get Involved page to see how you can contribute. And if you have been through something like this yourself, or if you know someone who has, reach out. You are not as alone as the mob wants you to feel.