1: A community forms

A loosely-aligned online community will form, typically around a topic or issue that they’re passionate about. This can be political, like supporters of particular ideologies or political figures, or simply cultural, like fans of a media product like a movie or a band. In all these examples, it’s important to remember that many of these behaviors can be used both for good and bad, whether helping good-faith efforts to hold the powerful accountable or as part of hostile efforts to harm vulnerable people. The effect a community has on those with less power or privilege is what reveals the true nature of its intentions.

2: The community has a grievance

The galvanizing moment for a community to realize that it is a community is typically when they feel affronted. Prior to that moment, they may have been aware of each other’s presence and their reinforcement of values, but there was no catalyst for intentional organization. For example, in a subset of the Star Wars fan community, a galvanizing grievance was the deprecation of some parts of the shared story universe as being canonical, which then escalated to absurd heights in response to the change. In other cases, it’s the identification of a person or complementary community with which the group disagrees.

3: The community organizes

Faced with a shared grievance, the community starts to form structures of organization. Organization can happen in public, as in hashtags on public services like Twitter or Instagram and it can take place in private or semi-private venues, as in closed Facebook groups, subreddits, Slack channels or mailing lists. In larger communities, there will be multiple places for organizing, both public and private, based on the level of engagement and participation that each community member wants to participate in.

4: A community identity forms

As hashtags are used to organize, and names are chosen for the public and private community venues, the community will start to form an identity and will often adopt a name. Because the galvanizing event is usually a grievance, the identity name is often a reclamation of an epithet or criticism made by the oppositional group or individual.

5: Community leaders emerge, unacknowledged

As a natural byproduct of organizing in these public and private channels, individuals who want to help organize will emerge as leaders. As community identity solidifies, those who (consciously or unconsciously) recognize that a power structure is being created will start to jockey for leadership positions or prominence in the community. And of course, leadership status is often bestowed upon community members who have reputation that they bring over from other realms, such as having a pre-existing large network of followers, or being a celebrity or media figure in another domain. One of the most unusual but consistent traits of truly spontaneous online community formation is that leaders will often deny that they’re leaders. This can be both about a strategic desire to appear egalitarian while growing the community as well as genuine ignorance about the way online communities work. The denial of leadership happens in positive communities, where leaders may not want to seem presumptuous or arrogant by claiming leadership.

6: The community starts to take action

Now that an infrastructure is in place, a community will begin acting on the issue or topic that inspired its formation in the first place. Many times the ideas of what actions to take will arise from relatively anonymous community members, either spontaneously or in response to cultural events outside the community. The most actionable ideas then make their way into the private or semi-private channels where core community members gather, and are amplified by community leaders. In some cases, less prominent members of a community can elevate themselves to leadership status by advancing specific actions that the community rallies around.

7: A response

Now that the community has found a target and taken action, they’ll get some acknowledgement. In rare cases, the response will be effective and will de-escalate the situation, causing the community to either calm down or for its energy to fizzle completely, resulting in the community fading away. Typically, though, the response from the community’s target is defensive, and results in an escalation of the conflict.

8: Targets are identified

In the process of community conflict, there’s typically a very flawed identification of community targets. Correctly identifying who’s responsible for a particular grievance requires a deep knowledge of systems thinking, often requiring literacy about institutions or systems whose very inscrutability helped inspire the conflict in the first place. Given their imperfect model of the problem, the community gloms on to whomever is most visible or vulnerable as a target of their ire. Many times this is someone only tangentially related to the target organization, or someone who has no real position of power in an institution, but who has made themselves visible by trying to defend against the community’s action. In other cases, the target is someone picked specifically for their symbolic meaning to the community, as a representative of the greater issue that galvanizes them; this often happens without regard to whether the person actually has control or agency over the issue.

9: Leaders direct the community to attack

Now that the community has identified a target, its leaders (who deny that they are leaders, see #5) will direct the community to focus on that person or institution by making them hypervisible. As outlined in “What Is Public?”, a community will shift information that is merely accessible into being broadly disseminated, while wrapping it in a context that exaggerates, distorts, or sometimes intentionally misrepresents the target. On Twitter, this can take the form of quoting other tweets or “hate-retweeting” them, and on Tumblr, YouTube and other networks, this often takes the form of shared screenshots. Entire media properties like Twitchy exist simply to practice this pattern of behavior. Because the leaders deny they are leaders, this act of making a target hypervisible is seen as innocent, or at least not intentionally malicious.

This is the most clear phase of the cycle: Look for a relatively minor person’s words taken out of context and used as proof of the villainy of an entire community. In many cases, the leader is genuinely unaware of the implications of telling their community to focus on a target, as they may not interact with the anonymous community members who lurk in their channels.

10: The Pile-On

Once a web community has decided to dislike a person, topic, or idea, the conversation will shift from criticizing the idea to become a competition about who can be most scathing in their condemnation. (See “10 Rules of Internet”.) The tactic here is for the community to use any publicly-accessible information about the person as ammunition for attacking them, and to delegate the worst attacks to the most anonymous members of the community. These footsoldiers in an online attack are people who generate multiple, anonymous throwaway accounts, and whose participation in the private or semi-private organizing channels is largely as lurkers, not coordinators. This gives the leaders additional plausible deniability about their culpability for inciting the pile-on.