Social media is, fundamentally, a brilliant idea. It allows for us to stay in close contact with friends, provides us with opportunities to meet new people and gives us an insight into the world of celebrity. I vividly remember my best friend telling me, at 13 years old, to download Instagram – “a cool app where we can post pictures and see what Taylor Swift is doing! Cool!”. this was, however, an incredibly innocent reason to download one of the most popular social media sites (at the point of writing, there are 1 billion active accounts), as there is a much darker side to these website that we are rarely made aware of – the side that encourages bullying through posting hateful and nasty comments to other users.
Platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook provide users with a unique set of tools that allows them to bully one another not just on a public platform, but on a platform with such velocity and reach that means that hateful comments or vengeful pictures can go viral within hours. Cyberbullying and hate comments are no longer local afflictions in which one knows the perpetrator, they are anonymous and widespread, reaching levels that are overwhelming, scary, and detrimental to the victim’s mental health.
A simple google search for Instagram and hate comments garners myriad articles detailing personal accounts of having been bullied on the site; teenagers have experienced bullies creating accounts in their name to then solely upload what they deem to be ‘ugly’ pictures of the victim, accounts named after schools have been created as a means so spread anonymous hate via text posts and people are using the comments and direct message features to send hateful messages with no consequence. On a wider scale, hashtags that enforce hate speech (racism, antisemitism and homophobia) are rampant across the globe and are increasingly hard to track due to the limitations of the artificial intelligence used to locate and delete hate speech.
Whilst social media companies are focussing on how to crack down on hate comments by creating features where you can mute certain accounts and report comments, there is little discussion about the effect that these comments have on an individual’s mental health. Platforms such as Instagram are addictive in their nature, meaning that being a victim of hate crime often won’t be enough to make someone quit the site altogether, therefore resulting in them being further exposed to the hate and discrimination. The emotional toll of having hate crimes directed at you can be severe, with the increase in teen suicides between 2008 and 2015 being linked to an increase in cyberbullying and hate speech. Furthermore, being a victim of cyberbullying can have negative effects on one’s academic progression; students who have been attacked online by their peers feel unsafe at school and are therefore likely to not have as much motivation at school due to feelings of fear and distraction.
No one is exempt from being a victim of cyberbullying or hateful comments, and whether the victim be a teenager doing their GCSE’s or a celebrity, the negative impact that these comments can have on the victim’s mental health do not differ. The screen of anonymity that the internet offers does not mean that the hate spread through it is any less harmful, it is simply the 2019 version of when everyone received copies of their pages in Regina George’s burn book. Being anonymous doesn’t make anything okay, nor does it mean that it won’t have an emotional effect on the victim. Being nice costs nothing, and it might just save someone’s life.
Comments