Don’t respond to negative comments. Responding to negative comments can make them more likely to get noticed and give them more influence. On many social media sites, you can block users, report users for policy violations, and/or delete negative comments.
If you choose to respond to negative comments, don’t respond to negativity with negativity. Stated another way: don’t hate on the haters.
If you feel it’s best to respond to a negative comment, try a private message, when possible à this is especially good if you know the person in real life, and you express some genuine care for how they’re doing while at the same time addressing their comment. Their negative comment is likely a good indication they could use some caring.
In responding to negative comments, both privately and publicly, don’t focus on proving the other person wrong or bad. Instead, try to inspire them to think critically – such as with questions rather than statements – in the hopes that that may help them see past some of their prejudices. “Loosening up” their take on things might be the best you can do. Also, realize that people who post negative things are hurting themselves by spending their time being fearful and hateful rather than curious and joyful. Keep this in mind: this person’s already hurting themselves, do I want to hurt them more, or do I want to try to make their life better?
Use humor to deflect and defuse negative comments. Humor can be a great interrupt for a pattern of anger, and can help blow off charge. You may want to be careful with this, though, as humor can sometimes be taken the wrong way, especially by people who don’t know you. One example of using humor to try to defuse things could be if two of your friends are arguing back and forth on Facebook about politics, you could write something like, “You guys could argue this all day, but it’s clear to me that the only way to settle this once and for all is with a Nerf foam gun duel. I propose high noon tomorrow. Safety glasses on, of course.”
Post positive or at least neutral comments to dilute and lessen the effects of negative ones. Especially if the most recent comment is negative, write something positive and sincere so others see that first. It doesn’t have to be something to try to negate the negative comment. If it is, in a way you’re giving an indirect response to the person who posted the negative comment, which may seem like a sort of reward to them – they got attention. Instead, any type of positive comment or neutral comment or question should do.
Leave a “suggested more honorable version” of the person’s comment. This is similar to a process called “Steel Manning” in which you try to create the strongest version of another person’s argument before arguing against that version. In this case, though, you don’t argue against it. I’ve done this in limited trials on my YouTube channel – where, for instance, a video called “5 reasons to speak honorably about Trump (even if you hate him)” got a number of negative comments. For examples of how to write suggested more honorable versions, look at those YouTube comments and/or through some of the suggested more honorable versions of politicians’ speech I provide on my website. Some things to look for and remove or modify are name calling, insults, mocking, being disrespectful, offering opinion as fact, assuming bad intent, providing misleading or inaccurate information, and promoting hate or violence.
If you respond to someone’s negative comment with something truly constructive that’s meant to be helpful and they still come back with more negativity, it’s likely best to disengage – the more responses a comment gets, the more attention it’s likely to get, so at some point you’re helping to amplify it. And, if no one reacted to negative comments, many people would probably stop leaving them.
Reduce negativity in yourself – I believe we’re always teaching others with our behaviors, so lead by example. Also, the less anger you have, the less likely you are to be reactive to someone’s online post or comment, and the less likely you’ll be to post something even subtly negative in response to it. One online course I like for reducing anger is on Udemy.com: Anger Management Techniques That Actually Work – it has a “perception management worksheet” in Section 5, video 18, that I think can be quite helpful if you use it regularly. The website personalexcellence.com also has some interesting techniques for removing anger from your life. And there are a number of books out there on the subject – while not specifically focused on anger, I like “Happiness Is a Choice” and other books by Barry Neil Kaufman as a way to reduce anger by choosing happiness.
Don’t click on negative clickbait, read negative mainstream media articles, or watch online videos of personalities who’ve built up a good part of their following by saying negative things, such as about the other side of the political spectrum from them. Some examples of headlines that may sound interesting, but are best to not click on if you want to avoid supporting negativity, are, from May 25, 2021 on foxnews.com: “Time to Fire Fauci: Lawmakers have grown tired of doctor’s COVID flip-flops,” and a May 26, 2021 opinion piece on wapo.com (The Washington Post): “Rarely has the GOP fixation on race shown all its ugly facets like this.” When you click on articles like this, you’re supporting them and more articles like them. And negativity on social media often feeds off of negativity in the mainstream media.
