I used to tell jokes on Twitter. They weren’t always good jokes, but I enjoyed telling them. It seems absurd now, but there was a time when I found Twitter almost exclusively a fun and easygoing space when I thought of it as ‘the good app’.
In those days my avi was a square instead of a circle, ‘likes’ were called ‘favourites’, and you had to go to an entirely different website to watch videos. It was a simpler time. In addition to making jokes, I discussed my mental health, tweeted about feminism and told my followers and friends what I was having for dinner. I had a few hundred followers, then a few thousand, then ten thousand, then twenty, then - well, you know how numbers work.
But as my tweets and my writing got more attention, so did my appearance, my personal life, my character. Aggressive, bad-faith, sexist, cruel messages rolled into my mentions, my DMs and even my work inbox in greater and greater numbers.
At first, it seemed almost comical how invested these accounts were in trying to hurt my feelings or get a certain reaction. I was often bolshie and antagonistic in response, thinking it must indicate a kind of relevance on my part that so many people were bothered by my words. Only occasionally would a message linger in my head, either for its particular crudeness or because it had contained some kind of real-world threat. In the latter case, I’d always tell myself not to worry. This was the internet. These people were all talk, no trousers, and definitely no intention of travelling to the small town where I lived to do me any of the harms they discussed in their messages.
More and more couples are choosing to create these agreements, but would you sign one?
Though this thinking probably saved me many sleepless nights, I know now that this was a naive and cavalier attitude. Angry, sexist, awful words on a screen (distressing enough in themselves) can absolutely escalate into real-world actions that aren’t so easily blocked and deleted. Though UK law has caught up to include internet harassment, victims often find themselves brushed off by police and social media moderators and told that there’s nothing to be done. Trolling on one social media site can become a full internet stalking campaign, and most victims are still woefully unsupported when this happens.
I spoke to Jaime*, 32, who is currently seeking a restraining order against a man who has been harassing and stalking her online since 2018. ‘People in my life are starting to take it seriously now, which is a relief. I think they thought - it’s just words, how can it be that bad? But it is that bad. It is so mentally draining not letting it worry you or seep into your daily life. It is hard.’
There are other types of internet cruelty that can wreak havoc on a person’s mental health. Holly* is a 25-year-old from Manchester who runs a parenting Instagram and endured terrible trolling after a screenshot of one of her Instagram stories was posted on a gossip site. ‘It was just really nasty. I’m made of strong stuff but that really tested me.’
The thread about Holly was centred mainly around a single story frame where she’d expressed frustration at something her youngest child had done. ‘Someone had taken one moment of my life, quite literally a feeling that had lasted a few minutes, and turned it into something so dark where I hated my child, wasn’t a fit mum, didn’t know what I was doing.’ This kind of trolling can be disguised as concern, but it rarely is. Holly is a trained paediatric nurse who was using her platform to share tips for other young mums who may feel overwhelmed. Any reasonable or good-faith discussion about her would have included this fact, but of course, it didn’t.
“It’s really hard to be hated on when you don’t know who you are yet.”
It can be argued that these gossip sites are a contained kind of malevolence and that influencers mentioned there have the option not to look and be hurt by what they see. But vitriol in one online space can easily boil over into others, and anonymous commentators whose entire MO is insulting a person’s character, physical appearance, work and social media presence don’t strike me as the most reasonable group. In Holly’s words- ‘people read the site and then came to my Instagram, my friend’s Instagrams, the brands I work with, and spout the same sh*t. It’s not a case of if you don’t read, it won’t hurt you- it’s bigger than that.’
The impulse when someone misrepresents you is to defend yourself, but in the case of online harassment or internet trolls, there are only so many rebuttals to be made. As sad as it seems, the people behind the anonymous accounts and the burner email address and the gossip threads are finding enjoyment in what they’re doing. It’s a leisure activity, something to do with their evenings or commutes to work. Cloaked by a false name, a community of like-minded individuals and the illusion of impunity, they’re unlikely to admit pettiness or change their ways.
In the years since that first flush of trolling, I’ve dealt with death threats, scores of unsolicited dick pics, people trying to find out where I worked and lived and anonymous accounts reaching out to exes to ask if they would sell intimate photos of me. I’ve had my face photoshopped onto images of naked women and have been called a stupid bitch in at least six languages. It’s been exhausting, even when I’ve managed to laugh it off in the moment. I’ve come to see that something doesn’t need to threaten your immediate physical safety to have real psychic consequences. I’ve also realised that caring about your own peace of mind can mean resisting more baser urges to snoop, to name-search, and to seek out online gossip. Blocking and muting accounts or keywords is one way you can look after your mental health while continuing t use social media. You can also change your notification settings on various sites to only allow prompts and messages from certain people- e.g. followers or mutuals, or users who have confirmed their phone number and email address.
Some of our favourite shows may have had some dark secrets.
I believe it’s naive to talk about the internet as though it exists somewhere outside of reality. It’s a space where many of us spend hours and hours of our time each week, where we may generate income, make friends, meet partners, and build communities. It’s also somewhere we may disagree, debate, and come across people we dislike and who dislike us. It’s a social environment, and the impact of what happens there is real, even after we close out of an app or delete a nasty message. Practising good digital self-care means recognising that sometimes it does wear on you to be misunderstood, misrepresented and attacked, and taking steps to be free of it.
Since changing my settings and deciding no longer to engage with internet trolls, my user experience on social media has been much more pleasant, and my mental health has benefitted. I’ve even started telling jokes again on Twitter.
