Don’t Give It Life: The Mom-Billboard Rule For Trolls Explained

You know that sudden urge when a stranger in your mentions drags you for three paragraphs about your shoes, your career, or how you carry yourself? One of the hosts on the episode just told the room to kill that impulse completely. He dropped a blunt piece of media training that basically says fighting back is how you hand a complete nobody a microphone.

The advice traces back to a conversation with Miriam Mak, who apparently laid down a hard boundary for dealing with public criticism. “Never care what people say because whatever they say, they’ve said it,” he tells the panel. “You can’t change what they’ve said out there. But don’t give it energy. Don’t give it life. Don’t respond.”

The logic is cold but mathematically sound. When you fire back, you stop being a public figure and start playing their game. “The minute you respond, you give it life,” he argues. “You’ve now made that person relevant.” And since half the people commenting are probably strangers you would never recognise in a queue, engaging with them is just volunteering for emotional damage.

If You Can’t Put It On A Billboard, Shut Up

The room loses its mind when he lays out the actual barometer they use for media training before dropping a response. It comes down to one visual test. “If you can’t put it on a billboard for your mom to read, then don’t do it,” he explains. The instant you see a trigger and feel that human instinct kick in to clap back, you pause and run the billboard check.

He paints a quick picture of how badly this usually goes. Someone fires off a furious text blast swearing at an unknown account, only to watch the replies instantly turn into a mockery of their own meltdown. The panel laughs loudly as he breaks down the cycle: you step down from your pedestal to fight an idiot, and the timeline immediately starts asking why you bothered. It’s a masterclass in emotional triage.

My take is that this isn’t about silence; it’s about strategic conservation. We live in an algorithm designed to monetise outrage, so treating every hot take as personal warfare guarantees burnout. If you ask me, protecting your peace by refusing to validate anonymous noise is the only sustainable flex left in digital space. The moment you decide your reputation isn’t worth trading with a keyboard warrior, you win by default.

There’s also a practical layer to this. He points out that much of the worst talk hides behind closed doors in private WhatsApp groups where the wider public never gets to see the chaos. If you aren’t logged into those exclusive chats, the toxicity supposedly shouldn’t bleed into your reality. Choosing to abstain becomes less about cowardice and more about recognising that some rooms are just empty stages waiting for an actor to ruin their own scene.

So next time your thumb hovers over the reply button while reading absolute garbage online, remember the billboard test. Would you print it for your mother to read on a highway overpass? If the answer is no, close the app and walk away. Are you still trying to prove a point to strangers, or have you finally decided your energy costs more than that?

Source: Macfarlane Moleli: YFM Madness | ANC Saved Him | Lebo Mathosa | Lines With Mandoza | Celeb HIV Surge — Podcast and Chill Network. The link opens at the moment quoted. Quotes are from the episode’s automatic transcript.