The Steelhead

A case study in violent internet toxicity

The steelhead that caused it all…

I originally wrote this in September 2023, and it remains the best (worst?) example of toxic virality I’ve ever had to suffer through. With salmon season starting in Alaska, as well as on the Great Lakes, it’s a good, ahem, “hook” to talk about maybe just maybe thinking a moment before you rage-comment on something online…

~ Hank

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Rage is the currency of the internet.

I mean, we all know this, or at least should. But I got an especially rich dose of hate last week in a way that surprised even me.

As you may know by now, I have been in Alaska fishing salmon commercially with my friend Tyson. We use a gill net to catch them. It’s a highly regulated affair, and I am happy to say that our bycatch is minimal. I mentioned the most common one, starry flounder, in my last post about what life is like aboard a fishing boat, and they always live to swim another day.

Well, every once in a while, we get a steelhead in our net. It happens maybe a half-dozen times during the three-month season. I’ve only seen it three times. And about half of those steelhead survive when we release them from the net. We eat the other half, because, well, they’re dead and we are forbidden to sell them.

I thought I’d explained this well in a short video of me pulling a steelie out of our net that I posted to Instagram. Apparently not.

Within an hour, the Internet Rage Machine kicked into full gear.

First off, I am well aware that West Coast steelhead anglers are a breed apart. They are passionate about this sea-run rainbow trout, and 99 percent of them refuse to eat any steelhead at all. They just like to catch them, fight the fight, then release them. The tug is the drug, as they say. Not my jam, but whatever.

I was, however, under the impression that these folks knew that even with catch and release, they are killing something between 5 and 15 percent of the fish they release. So yeah, catch 10 steelhead, one dies, despite your best efforts.

Apparently this isn’t as well known as I’d thought. Also, given that Tyson catches more than 10,000 salmon a season, the presence of maybe six trout or so is, while unfortunate, kind of amazing in the pantheon of bycatch. Again, I had thought I’d made this clear.

But this is not a story about bycatch. That will come in another post. This is a story about the wild-eyed hate that the Instagram algorithm whipped up in an instant, and which was sustained over several days, until, having enough, I took the video down.

The numbers alone are startling. In the four days the post was up:

• There were more than 110 comments.

• My Instagram account added roughly 500 new followers.

• The post itself got nearly 3000 likes, which is a lot for me.

• The video had more than 75,000 views, one of my highest ever.

• I had to ban more than a dozen people, for reasons you will see in a moment.

I should be clear that many people disagreed with my position on this or that, or with commercial fishing in general, respectfully and calmly. Those comments I engaged with. Happy to have that conversation. Had it just been this, all well and good.

But it wasn’t.

The first wave was a combination of actual steelhead anglers, vegans (?!) and bots. I know, weird, right? I can only guess that the accounts were bots because they had no posts and no followers.

A selection of my favorite comments:

“I hope your hull cracks, you sink and die and salmon eat your dead body.”

“Fuck you, you fucking asshole. I hope you die.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself. Get a life and go die.”

“I’m going to rape your daughter in front of you, you scum!”

This last one is especially disturbing because I don’t have children.

The slightly more literate ones’ arguments boiled down to things like all commercial fishing should be banned. Or that no bycatch should be allowed at all. Or that steelhead are endangered everywhere. Um, OK? Hard to know where to even start with these…

Not one person mentioned habitat loss. Not one. And as with hunting, when a species is in decline, as steelhead most definitely are, habitat is almost always the primary reason. It’s especially true with steelhead.

The catch-and-release people who attacked me had all convinced themselves that they don’t ever kill fish, which is patently false according to every study done, and there have been a lot.

The larger argument that commercial fishing of any kind needs to be banned is, at its core, an elitist one that suggests that only those with the means to fish themselves, which is not cheap when you travel to Alaska, should have access to these fisheries. Should only locals or wealthy tourists be allowed to eat Alaska salmon?

Another thread of criticism fails to differentiate between different gillnet fisheries. Gillnets in some parts of the country are indeed horrific for bycatch. Not in our fishery.

I could go on. The crux is that it appeared that no one actually listened to my words on the video, or if they did, they didn’t care. They just wanted to be outraged.

The Hate Machine requires us to be so in order to function.

It feeds on grievance, on umbrage. In so many areas of our life. And we willingly feed it those things, at all hours of the day. For me, Instagram is, normally, a haven away from this. But in this case look what happened: I posted something that turned out to be controversial, and I was rewarded for it.

All those likes. All those new followers. All those views. If all I cared about were metrics, I could post that sort of thing all the time, be internet famous, revel in my influencer status.

But then I’d be a willing accomplice, a henchman, to the Machine. I’d be banning bots and deleting violent comments on a daily basis. Or hell, just leave them up, like many big IG accounts do. After all, engagement is engagement, they say.

Toxic, to say the least.

The few times someone was an adult, we had a conversation, and in every instance, that person learned details that he or she didn’t know, which softened their positions. In many cases, they had good points relevant to my situation, or just solid insight into their own situation, which might be in Canada or North Carolina or wherever. We learned.

By actually talking, we broke the Machine, at least for a moment — and in so doing preserved our humanity. At least for a moment.