WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE CANCELLED

For one writer, sending a 48-word tweet on her morning commute had bigger consequences than she could have imagined

1OTH MAY 2O19 STARTED like any other day for author NATASHA TYNES. Until a hastily worded tweet found her in the eye of a global SOCIAL MEDIA STORM, from which there was seemingly NO WAY OUT

FORTY-FIVE MINUTES WAS ALL IT TOOK. Forty-five minutes was the length of my transgression; the amount of time my tweet was up before I deleted it.

If you’d told me that would be long enough to destroy everything, I wouldn’t have believed you. I had a successful career in international development, a supportive circle of friends, a loving family and, now, with a book deal, a bright literary future ahead. What could possibly go wrong? The answer: everything.

It came tumbling down like a house of cards one early spring day in 2O19. One minute I was just me, the next I was a racist, a snitch, a classist, an elitist, a bitch, a white supremacist and a failed writer. My kids and my husband were mocked and threatened. Reporters camped outside my house, hoping to get a glimpse of me. Strangers

called for me to ‘be killed in the street’. Not even Hollywood could have dreamed up the script for the turn of events that day.

I was on my morning commute on the Red Line in Washington, DC, when it happened. I had woken as usual at 6am to work on my second novel and do some marketing for my debut book They Called Me Wyatt, which was set to be released in just four weeks’ time. I had breakfast, got my two kids prepared for school and readied myself for work.

I WAS ABOUT 1O MINUTES INTO MY RIDE when I saw her: a Metro employee in uniform carrying a Styrofoam box that had what looked like her breakfast in it. She walked across the train car while taking a few bites, then settled on a seat, where she continued to eat. Was it the smell of the food that bothered me that day? Or the blatant disregard for the Metro rules that prohibit eating and drinking – and that had caught me out some years before, when I was pulled up for eating a banana on the platform? I should’ve minded my own business and said nothing. Who am I, the Metro police? Yes, I should’ve minded my own business, but I didn’t. Instead I leaned forward and said to her: ‘I thought we weren’t allowed to eat on the train?’

‘Worry about yourself,’ she responded.

I was shocked by her reply and, in that moment, felt I needed to do something. To my mind, this was another example of the poor service provided by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) and I felt compelled to ‘expose’ their hypocrisy. Throwing shade at the Metro on social media is common among locals. After all, the company slogan is, ‘See something, say something.’ As a prolific tweeter, I’d criticised what I saw as a costly, subpar Metro before, so I thought: What’s another tweet?

It was poor judgement, but I decided I needed proof to support my allegation, so I took her picture and told her pointblank that I was going to report what I saw. Then I tweeted her image to my 1O,OOO followers with the caption: ‘When you’re on your morning commute and see a @WMATA employee in UNIFORM eating on the train. I thought we were not allowed to eat on the train. This is unacceptable. Hope @WMATA responds. When I asked the employee about this, her response was “worry about yourself”.’ I tagged the official Metro account, as well as an account called Unsuck DC Metro, a sort of unofficial watchdog that’s highly critical of the local transport system.

Within a few minutes, the official Metro account responded, thanking me for ‘catching’ one of their employees in violation of the rules and asked for more information. My knee-jerk response: to provide them with it immediately.

It was right after I hit send that the panic started. Did I mean to do that? Did I just jeopardise this woman’s employment? That wasn’t my intention. As I grappled with the ethics of what I had just done, my phone began to flash like tiny streaks of lightning.

There were tens, then hundreds, then thousands of notifications. Pure unadulterated anger – some from influential names on social media – flooded my Twitter account. I scanned them, trying to get a sense of what was happening. Words like ‘snitch’ and ‘racist’ dominated the responses. Snitch, I could understand, but racist? It’s true that the employee was Black – and as a Jordanian immigrant to the US, I understand how vigilant people need to be against prejudice – but all I can say is that her race honestly never crossed my mind.

I clenched my jaw so hard it hurt. Hands shaking, I deleted my tweet. But it was already too late. As the minutes ticked by, out in the world I was turning from a woman who’d had a bad morning and made a stupid mistake – which I tried to rectify as soon as possible, by contacting the WMATA over the phone asking them not to discipline the employee (they confirmed that they wouldn’t) – into a vindictive racist; someone irredeemable, someone who had to be ‘cancelled’.

When I got to work, I was in a fog of shock and bewilderment, my phone now a lethal weapon in my bag. I told my boss what had happened, then locked myself in a colleague’s office while I sobbed and hyperventilated.

Do I regret sending the tweet? Of course. It’s the greatest regret of my life – not just because of the trouble it caused, but because the response was a brutal confrontation with the real-world impact of social media. It’s easy to feel like your comments are floating away, with no one paying attention. In my mind, I was just a fed-up commuter moaning about my journey. The effect on the employee’s life could’ve been enormous; the effect on mine already was.

Later that day, my husband picked me up from work. As he drove, I worried how my publisher would react. I knew what the ramifications of a social media storm could be.

A few hours on – as the condemnations piled up, with no sign of slowing – they called. There was a chill on the line. I was told that the main publisher was really ‘pissed’. I began to shake. It took me four years to get my book published. It wasn’t just a book deal, it was my future, held together by a frayed seam.

I woke up the following day thinking it had all been a nightmare but, when I realised it wasn’t, I jolted out of bed in search of my phone.

My husband had hidden it, but I found it inside the car’s glove compartment. And that’s when I saw it: my publisher’s

“DO I REGRET SENDING THE TWEET? Of course, it’s the greatest regret OF MY LIFE. The response was a brutal confrontation with THE REAL-WORLD IMPACT OF social media”

Twitter announcement declaring that I had done something ‘truly horrible’ and, as a consequence, it would no longer be publishing my novel.

Here’s how it feels to be caught in the eye of something that is beyond your control. First, you feel anger and injustice. Then disbelief. This is the point when you think you have a fighting chance still – like feeling the downburst of a tornado coming in, but thinking you still have time to run. But, as the voices get louder, meaner, angrier… you start to fade out.

The days that followed went by in a daze. Authors who had previously endorsed my book started retracting and deleting their reviews. Writers I had once considered friends quickly withdrew. The company I was working for didn’t renew my contract. I visited my family doctor, then a therapist and finally a psychiatrist. I took sedatives and swallowed antidepressants. I couldn’t eat, hardly slept and, by the end of the week, I lost track of the hours, of the days. I lost count of the tears. I lost it all.

We’ve all seen names we know being tarnished by an angry online crowd seeking justice. Maybe we’ve even played a part ourselves. It’s easy to get caught in the slipstream of mass mentality, but it’s far harder to extricate yourself from it. I’m sure a lot of the people who talked about me on Twitter were well-intentioned and thought they were calling out racism and bigotry (though probably not the ones who called me a terrorist, a jihadi, Hamas, Hezbollah, an aeroplane bomber and told me to go back where I came from). Perhaps they were keen to show what their own values and beliefs were, or thought that they were helping to dismantle structural prejudice.

But did they realise that cumulatively they were going to cost another woman of colour her peace of mind, her health and her career, even when she had no racism in her heart? Would they have still done it if they had? Sitting alone in our online bubbles, it’s almost impossible to understand that typed words on a screen can explode into another person’s life like a bomb.

After the initial shock and the mental breakdown, the shame and guilt settled in. How could I do this to my family? What kind of a horrible person am I? A depression so dark and deep had taken hold of me, so I could barely raise myself out of bed. The house suffered, the kids suffered, my husband suffered. Days became weeks and weeks became months. The online attacks continued, with angry comments littering my social media accounts and filling my inbox. I manically blocked accounts like someone who was desperately trying to control a fire that was burning her alive.

I saw a therapist, I read, I looked for jobs, I gained weight, I avoided people, I hardly wrote a word. I tried to get back to social media slowly after shutting down my accounts. Every time I peered into the beehive, I got stung by angry commenters who seemed to be waiting for my return.

BUT IN THE MIDST OF DARKNESS, AN UNEXPECTED OUTCOME AROSE. A few months later, I was contacted by a publisher who wanted to pick up my novel. They believed what happened to me had been a ‘shame’, and wanted to give me a second chance. In April 2O2O, a new venture called Rebeller Media announced that it would be publishing my novel. As outlined in a personal letter posted on the Rebeller website, publisher Dallas Sonnier said they were building an empire based on fighting cancel culture, and found my novel to be ‘a compelling, original thriller’.

To my surprise, the book was welcomed and, while some people jumped to attack me again, those who applauded the publication of my novel outnumbered them.

I still get flashbacks and I think about the incident every day. Even writing this account was difficult, and I had to stop numerous times to take a mental health break. But every story has another side. Shouldn’t we hear both, before we make our judgements?

What did my year of being cancelled teach me? There’s no doubt that the controversy has changed me. While I learned how terrifying it can be to be the target of a Twitter mob, I also learned not to use my own social media influence negatively again. Those who attacked me for being a snitch had a point and I listened and learned. I now know that a tweet can change a person’s life, in a moment, and forever, and that’s a lesson I’ll never forget.