(2017-02-07) I Helped Create The Milo Trolling Playbook You Sho

Ryan Holiday: I Helped Create the Milo Trolling Playbook. You Should Stop Playing Right Into It.

In 2009, I helped sketch out a marketing campaign for an internet personality and blogger named Tucker Max.

Several months of chaos and controversy that ultimately drove Tucker’s book to No. 1 on the New York Times Bestseller list, sold out a multi-college bus tour and ultimately sold millions of dollars worth of tickets, dvds and books.

We encouraged protests at colleges by sending Outraged emails to various activist groups and clubs on campuses where the movie was being screened. We sent fake tips to Gawker, which dutifully ate them up. We created a boycott group on Facebook that acquired thousands of members. We made deliberately offensive ads and ran them on websites where they would be written about by controversy-loving reporters. After I began vandalizing some of our own billboards in Los Angeles, the trend spread across the country, with parties of feminists roving the streets of New York to deface them (with the Village Voice in tow).

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. Because it’s basically the exact playbook that Right-Wing blogger Milo Yiannopoulos is running on his own cross-country trolling tour

You guys are playing completely into their hands.

Someone like Milo or Mike Cernovich doesn’t care that you hate them—they like it. It’s proof to their followers that they are doing something subversive and meaningful.

You’re worried about “normalizing” their behavior when in fact, that’s the one thing they don’t want to happen.

The key tactic of alternative or provocative figures is to leverage the size and platform of their “not-audience” (i.e. their haters in the mainstream) to attract attention and build an actual audience

This is what creates the incentives for trolls to be more and more provocative and to care less and less about what normal, middle of the group people think

When protesters try to revoke someone’s right to speak or when someone like Richard Spencer is physically assaulted on camera, you’re not intimidating anyone—you’re emboldening them. You’re giving them a wonderful recruiting tool.

The last thing you ever want to do is give an opponent the moral high ground.

actually listen and talk to them. To me, the most effective retorts against the Alt-Right were when Trevor Noah had Tomi Lahren on his show and when Elle Reeve profiled Richard Spencer for Vice. Both came off looking mostly like jokes. Tomi Lahren showed her age. Richard Spencer revealed his movement to be mostly a collection of a few thousand sad dorks.

Wale’s Twitter exchange with Tomi was effective too—there was no outrage, no opposition, just teasing.

It’s easy to sound smart and provocative when you’re the underdog. It’s easier to be reckless when you have nothing to lose. It’s also easier to create a united front when you really are being persecuted or attacked—when you’re an outsider. At least all of this is harder than expressing a coherent, cogent message for an extended period of time.