WHY ARE CELEBRITIES TURNING INTO THE TROLLS THEY’VE SO DESPISED?
By mental health advocate Natasha Devon MBE
Last week, when Twitter trolling became a celebrity pastime between Camp Taylor and Camp Kanye, I sat up and took notice. Something had changed. The people leading the charge weren’t your usual faceless trolls: it was Kim and Khloé Kardashian and their celebrity friends vying to take potshots, backed by an army of fans who piled in to the public argument. Having myself been on the receiving end of torrents of abuse, I can only imagine how it must feel when multiplied million-fold.
According to the BBC, I’m ‘one of the most prolifically trolled women in Britain’. Because I’m outspoken on body image and sexism, I’ve been threatened with violence and called all sorts of names – and usually these messages don’t bother me much. I’ve grown accustomed; sad but true. I’ve only reported users twice. But, whether or not you’ve experienced it first-hand and regardless of where you stand on the whole debacle, I challenge anyone to see the baying twitchfork mob take down Ms Swift and not feel troubled by it.
What we saw last week was a new strain of celebrity tussle. It was snide, less openly hateful comments that were thrown back and forth – comments that straddle the line between banter and bullying, comments that I feel are the most insidious.
So now, I think it’s up to us, to call out the more subtle bullying we see online. And maybe it’s time the social media makers did more too, by taking a zero tolerance policy on anything that could make their users feel unsafe.