From a behavioral psychology perspective we don’t necessarily discern between good quality and poor quality attention when considering attention as reinforcement. Eg behaviors that are reinforced by attention seek any attention regardless of the type of attention. I don’t care if you validate what I do, I care that you observe what I do. This is a core tenet of applied behavior analysis and why extinction for attention maintained behaviors requires removal of all attention, not just praise.

Thus “don’t feed the trolls” being the most sage wisdom in the history of the internet. However, we struggle to understand this core concept of the human condition and we don’t really cover it in any basic education. So as a result we have a society wherein it’s very easy for people who don’t give a shit about their image to rise in stature by being controversial instead of being correct or good.

As an aside this is something parents struggle with SO much in my work. We identify an attention maintained behavior. I educate on the above in more detail, function of behavior, extinction, etc. and then they almost always need to be corrected because they immediately scold the child, which is providing attention! Data analysis will show this has little impact on rates of behavior but planned ignoral will often have dramatic consequences if they can actually stay consistent with implementation. The problem for someone like Elon is that you will simply never get everyone to ignore him. This procedure generally only works with young children wherein you can get a good degree of stimulus control for that reason. Otherwise it’s the issue with telling a kid in middle school to ignore their bully. They might do it and they might do a perfect job but that bully will almost certainly continue to get reinforcement from other sources making the initial kids efforts essentially meaningless.