Why Someone Who Hates You Wants Others To Hate You Too

Conflicts and disagreements are common in every relationship. Sometimes, they are resolved. Other times, the people involved realise they have grown too far apart.

If a relationship goes badly, two people can simply separate. One person may decide, I do not like this person. Another may conclude, I no longer trust this person.

Neither position requires an audience, a coalition, or a group of enablers.

When Private Dislike is Not Enough

Ordinary conflict can turn into abuse when one person turns what happened into a smear campaign. They start recruiting friends to partake in shared hostility against the other person. They circulate screenshots and recordings. Then they use gossip, narrative control, and triangulation to isolate the other person from their friends. When somebody in their circle refuses to partake, they are frozen out.

Why Someone Does This

1. To Isolate the Other Person as Punishment

One reason a person may try to recruit others into a conflict is punishment.

Perhaps they expected the disagreement to end differently. They may have assumed the other person would eventually apologise, return, beg for reconciliation, or restore the previous relationship. When that does not happen, the loss of influence can produce anger and a desire to make separation costly.

Negative stories are then circulated not simply to explain what happened, but to alter the other person’s social environment. The goal is to make them feel the cost of losing the relationship by causing them to lose other relationships they may also depend on.

2. To Cover Their Own Tracks

Another reason is self-protection.

When someone is guilty of abuse, manipulation or dishonesty, they tend to have a strong incentive to control the story before the other person begins telling their own version of events.

One way of doing this is to discredit the other person in advance.

They may portray the target as unstable, dishonest, vindictive, jealous or dangerous. Screenshots may be selectively circulated. Context may be removed. Old incidents may be retold in ways that support the emerging narrative.

This can create a form of pre-emptive reputational defence. If the target later speaks about what happened, the audience has already been given a framework through which to interpret everything they say.

Reputational Warfare and the Psychology of Recruitment

If we fall out and I strongly dislike you afterwards, but everyone around me continues to find you pleasant, trustworthy or competent, I am left with the discomfort of feeling that others may perceive me as the problematic one.

This is where the idea of destroying the other person’s image can become enticing.

The objective can quietly change from:

“I don’t like this person.”

to:

“Other people need to see why they shouldn’t like this person either.”

How Recruitment Happens

One way to recruit someone into hating another person is through manipulation.

At this stage, the instigator may already understand the person’s emotional sensitivities, loyalties or existing biases. They can then present information in a way designed to trigger those vulnerabilities—a cropped screenshot, an edited recording, a selective retelling of events, or, in some cases, fabricated material.

The recipient is not necessarily given enough information to evaluate what actually happened. Instead, they are given a version designed to produce a particular emotional response.

Manipulation can be difficult to recognise because people often evaluate information through trust, emotion and existing relationships rather than through detached investigation.

How Shared Dislike Turns Into Coalition

Once two people share hostility toward the same person, that hostility can become part of their bond. A common target can gradually become part of the group’s bonding ritual. Much like a political coalition, conversations, screenshots, jokes, interpretations and repeated retellings can create intimacy between members of the group.

In this situation, shared hatred can become strangely productive for those participating. It gives them something to discuss, something to agree about and sometimes even something to organise around.

This dynamic may become especially powerful in social environments where belonging feels scarce. When acceptance into a group is uncertain or highly valued, participating in shared hostility can become a way to signal loyalty and secure one’s place within the coalition. Fresh information about the target can become social currency: something that earns attention, strengthens one’s position, or secures an invite.

Refusing to Hate the Common Enemy Can Become Risky

Suppose I tell you everything terrible I believe about another person.

You listen.

But then you still choose to maintain your own relationship with them.

If my goal was simply to express how I felt, your decision should not necessarily threaten me.

But if my goal was coalition formation, your neutrality becomes a problem.

You have refused recruitment.

This is why some conflicts eventually produce loyalty tests, and, depending on how expensive the target is, those that pass can form a tighter subgroup within the wider group.

Not Every Warning Is a Smear Campaign

This distinction is essential because people can genuinely share harmful experiences for legitimate reasons. The conversation shifts from ordinary venting or warning into smear work when private texts, selective screenshots, edited recordings, half-truths, or decontextualised material are circulated to recruit others into hostility. Specific allies may be drawn in to repeat, defend or amplify the story—people sometimes described in popular online language as “flying monkeys.”

Selective recordings are especially useful for this kind of manipulation. A recorded private conversation may have lasted for hours, yet only thirty seconds are shared. The recipient does not get the entire conversation; they hear only the portion someone has chosen for them to hear.

Context disappears. What happened before and after the clip disappears. Tone, provocation, clarification and contradiction may all disappear with it.

When Gossip Is Enough To End A Friendship

If someone is willing to permanently change their relationship with you based on hearsay, a screenshot, or a recording without seeking context, the relationship was never secure in the first place. Losing such ties brings the quiet relief that they were never truly solid to begin with.

Smear Labour: The Administrative Work Of Keeping A Smear Campaign Running

A sustained smear campaign does not maintain itself. It requires labour.

That labour can include monitoring the target, collecting screenshots, preserving old material, recruiting sympathetic audiences, repeatedly retelling incidents, coordinating interpretations, introducing new people to the narrative, intensifying activity when competing accounts emerge, and generating fresh attention whenever interest begins to fade.

Smear labour is the administrative, social and communicative work required to create, distribute, maintain and periodically renew a damaging narrative about another person.

The Fantasy of Reputational Destruction

Smear campaigners often behave as though human beings have one unified social reputation, and as though one group has the power to destroy another person’s standing across every social environment.

But reputational destruction is not a neat job.

You can be disliked in one room and deeply valued in another. Different communities require different forms of persuasion. More discerning environments can also recognise smear work for what it is, increasing the workload for those trying to control the narrative.

There is another limitation: sabotaging someone else’s reputation does not create a shield against the ordinary realities of life. No matter how devoted you are to destroying another person’s reputation, you still have your own life to live, your own relationships to maintain and your own problems to solve.

Cruelty does not create a free ticket to an easy life.