How an innocent giggle exposed the twits lurking on Twitter

Right way to deal with bullies is to ignore them and offer support and encouragement

I’ve decided to Stand on Guard for Jocelyn Alice.

She’s the soulful singersongwriter who belted out a beautiful rendition of O Canada in Miami on July 11 prior to the start of Major League Baseball’s All- Star Game. She also let out a nervous giggle in the middle of the anthem. Judging from comments on Twitter, you’d think the Calgary crooner was Omar Khadr and had just received $10.5 million from the taxpayers or something.

Alice who is best known for two major hits — Jackpot and Bound to You — is a petite woman with a big, soulful voice that rivals Adele. But there’s little that’s big or soulful about the attacks she’s endured, mostly on Twitter, since her chortle was heard by hundreds of thousands of viewers.

Alice explained her untimely laugh in two tweets on the very medium that has excoriated her: “A BIG thank you to the @MLB for one of the best days of my life yesterday. I giggled because I saw some fellow Canadians on the big screen and was overcome with excitement in that moment. I love my country. I am so proud to be Canadian.”

Totally plausible and a video of the screen proves that Canadians with a flag were visible on the Jumbotron at the time of her giggle. She was singing in front of a crowd of more than 37,000 people with an estimated TV audience of 8.2 million.

The controversy should have stopped at her explanation. Instead, it turned into full blown Gigglegate.

“Alice in Blunderland,” starts one tweet, “Your (sic) an embarrassment. Don’t sing the anthem anymore please.”

“What a cover up,” says another. “You embarrassed yourself and I hope you never sing the anthem again.”

From far and wide people even started attacking her for things other than the giggle or her singing.

“Even your name is cringeworthy. Don’t ever sing in public again. Actually just don’t ever sing again. It’s clearly not your strong point.” So cruel.

As someone who writes opinion columns for a living, I receive nasty tweets and emails all the time as well as the occasional death threat and unprintable comments. All of my colleagues do. It’s so common that it’s like water and mosquitoes off an elephant’s hide.

While the viciousness doesn’t, for the most part, get under my skin, I know others who are depressed by social media attacks and I do wonder about the trend to incivility that social media seems to encourage. It’s a kind of a Lord of the Flies piling on.

Does the anonymity and spontaneity of the medium breed brutality and baseness or have those bullying qualities always been there?

Frankly, the Twitterverse has exposed what many sociologists have long suspected — we are mere cavemen with smartphones and automobiles. Our stuff has evolved but humanity has improved little.

Thankfully, many other people praised Alice’s heartfelt perfor- mance. That’s the right way to deal with bullies. Ignore them and say the opposite. Step up and encourage when others attack and detract.

Alice is 31 years old and is likely tough enough to deal with the tyrannical Twitterati.

But we know at least two highly publicized cases of teenage girls in Canada committing suicide after they were swarmed online and intimate photos of them shared.

I often wonder if they could have endured if even just a few friends had encouraged them instead of joined the feeding frenzy of negativity.

The day before Jocelyn Alice inadvertently chuckled, she wrote on Twitter: “I really love my country’s anthem.”

You can tell by the passion with which she sang it. Giggle and all. So I sent her a message urging her to remain strong and free and then I bought Bound to You on iTunes.