When a creator gets buried under a wave of abuse, the instinct is to find the person responsible and remove them. But the research keeps pointing to an uncomfortable truth: the environment in which hate occurs is a far more powerful driver than the individuals who take part in it.
Most online hate isn't the work of a few committed bad actors. It's ordinary people behaving badly in a context that rewards it — where a pile-on is visible, amplified, and socially frictionless. Change the context and much of the behaviour changes with it.
Why banning individuals doesn't scale
Removing a single account feels like justice, but it does nothing about the hundreds of others who saw the comment, piled on, and moved on. By the time a person is banned, the damage — the comment being seen, shared, and normalised — has already happened. You're playing whack-a-mole against a system that produces new moles faster than you can remove them.
The most effective intervention isn't punishing the last person to comment. It's changing what the next person sees.
Norms are contagious
Comment sections set their own norms in real time. A visible slur signals that slurs are acceptable here, and the next commenter calibrates to that. Remove it quickly enough and the norm never forms. This is why speed matters more than severity of punishment: the goal is to stop the environment from teaching people that abuse is welcome.
What protecting the environment looks like
For an individual creator, changing the environment means removing hate before it's seen — by them or by anyone else. Not flagging it for later review, not reporting it and waiting: removing it, automatically, in the moments after it's posted, so the pile-on never gains momentum and the creator never has to read it.
That's the shift Fendr is built around. We don't try to reform trolls — we change the environment they're acting in, one comment section at a time. It turns out that's where the leverage was all along.
This thinking shapes how Fendr helps people stop racist comments on Instagram, protect women from misogynistic abuse, and give journalists protection from pile-ons.