In a piece for the New York Times, several creators including Drew Afualo and Kacie Rose discussed how they deal with hate and vitriol online.
Rose, 30, went viral after posting a video of herself reacting to a Taylor Swift song, but in response, she received the most “vile, unhinged” comments she’d ever seen,” she said. Examples included comments calling her “effing ugly,” a “middle-aged woman,” and straight-up telling her to die.
“When I first started posting online, experiencing comments like these, including ones said in-person, were enough to take me down to dark, dark place,” Rose said in an Instagram post.
“However, those experiences also gave me a new lens to walk through with in life — armor that allowed me to realize the only person losing from allowing the fear of judgment to stop me from putting my full self out into the world, was me.”
Rose then responded to the hate in a video, telling the New York Times that she wants to resonate with women and girls who experience similar online hatred. “I wanted them to know that it’s not them,” she said.
Tackling online hate
Meanwhile, Afualo tells the outlet that this kind of hate “comes with the territory.” “The idea — if you were to post something as nonthreatening as ‘I love waffles,’ could be met with comments that say, ‘Oh, so you hate pancakes?!’ — is a harsh reality for anyone that has been online for a while,” she said.
So, how do you deal with online hate like this? Like Rose, Afualo makes videos directly addressing and engaging with the haters — with the caveat that this approach might do more harm than good.
“I think it’s helpful for people to keep in mind that hateful comments they see are typically posted by people who are the most extreme users,” William Brady, an assistant professor at Northwestern University, told the New York Times.
“Giving a toxic user any engagement (view, like, share, comment) ironically can make their content more visible. For example, when people retweet toxic content in order to comment on it, they are actually increasing the visibility of the content they intend to criticize. But if it is ignored, algorithms are unlikely to pick them up and artificially spread them further.”
You can read the full New York Times piece here.
