We tweeted it. We captioned it on Instagram. We posed, pouted and hashtagged. Be kind. An imperative we stylised and packaged until it became another lazy cliché. But did we live it? Of course not. Because that requires work.
If you cast even a cursory glance over major news sites and social media platforms, you won’t see too much of a problem. We complain, we ridicule, we speculate, we tag and we worship cats. We argue, yes, but at the very least, we see enough differences of opinion, enough people holding others accountable, enough good for the bad to be mitigated. It’s not perfect, but it’s okay.
The problems begin when you dig deeper. My daily internet consumption revolves around Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, news sites. Rinse and repeat. I rarely deviate from this cycle, except maybe to read a Wikipedia article about sea otters or the modality versus sodality parachurch dispute. I keep my content light and I keep my viewing light.
Maybe I’ve sheltered myself a little bit. I’m not naturally a confrontational person, although I do enjoy healthy debate. But I’m busy, and so my time online is spent glancing and skimming as opposed to engaging in anything particularly meaningful. The other day, as I skimmed my Twitter feed, I saw mention of a site called Tattle Life. I was bored, so I decided to have a look. And everything I thought I knew about social media changed.
I’m not naive enough to believe toxic online spaces don’t exist. I just avoid them. But when I imagined these spaces, I imagined them being filled with people who were obviously bigoted or aggressive, who wore their prejudices with pride; people you avoided at parties or in the supermarket because they exuded such virulent energy. But browsing that absolute cesspit of negativity and vitriol, I was struck by a number of things; mainly, how normal it all seemed.
For those of you who don’t know, Tattle Life is a forum, containing several different threads each discussing topics ranging from influencers and Instagram famous bloggers to current media trends and gossip. It’s like the meanest friend of Mumsnet. A thread I read on the famous Irish influencer Suzanne Jackson had hundreds of comments, pouring in only minutes apart. The comments were among the worst examples of cyber-bullying I’ve ever seen. And yes, I’m aware that sounds very SPHE teacher of me, but consider how much we hold up that the term “cyber-bully” to scrutiny. It is seen as one of the worst things you can do online. The women posting in these forums no doubt teach their kids to #BeKind and refrain from cyber bullying. And yet… the threads were relentlessly toxic pages of comments mocking this influencer’s appearance, coming up with various nicknames for her, her parents, sisters and friends, discussing her marriage, her entire life, all in the most violently spiteful manner.
And they think it’s okay. It’s acceptable. After all, influencers choose to live their lives in the open, right? They benefit from our interest and curiosity. They can’t cherry-pick what aspects of their lives we choose to discuss, can they? It’s hard to feel sorry for them when they are so content to blag freebies and show off their opulent lifestyles. Right? So it’s okay to call them names, to laugh at them, to delight when they fail, to eviscerate them in a public forum because they wore the wrong lipstick shade, or got tipsy at a public event, injected fillers into their imperfect faces or scratched their car or whatever minor transgression they committed this week. All of a sudden, two dozen comments in, the toxicity is okay. It’s allowed. Hell, it’s even funny. And we’re all doing it. Nitpicking every aspect of someone’s life and giggling conspiratorially while sipping our Chardonnay as our children sleep peacefully above us.
Step back. Step out of it. Does a thread with 267 comments tearing a woman to shreds need another comment? You have something funny to say about her knees.. is the validation from SweetiePie2011 really worth it? This is not real life but is real life. This is an echo-chamber of spiteful, toxic women who walk among us. And they probably chat with us at school-gates, they salute us in the supermarket, they like our Instagram posts only to snipe derisively at us in WhatsApp groups with their friends. This is what we have become. A society of people who will litter our Instagram feeds with posts about love and kindness and all that zen shit but will hide behind anonymous accounts to slate anyone we deem worthy of it. It unsettled me that in the sheer avalanche of negativity and derision, there was not one person, not one person, who aimed to mitigate the nastiness. It was all so normalised.
Be Kind shouldn’t be a fad. It shouldn’t be a sound bite, a hashtag, a cute post or a bandwagon. It should be an action that permeates every single interaction we have. It is more than retweets and hitting buttons. It is something to give, to do. And even if you can’t be kind, you can try not being unkind. That shouldn’t be a challenge.
CUPID OR CATS 