Everyone Hates The Comment Section

This week, Michelle make the classic mistake of replying to mean comments on the internet and, naturally....it did not go to plan. She invited one of her long time haters on the podcast and the reason he reneged may shock you! 

We’re talking trolls, comment sections,  and if it's possible to have empathy for the haters.

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Everyone hates you! Hello and welcome to Everyone Hates You, a podcast about rejections and failures with me, Michelle Shaughnessy. This is our first Monday episode of season two. I'm very excited for that. We are doing a little bit of a different spin on Everyone Hates You for season two. We are doing more episodes per week than just the one main one. I did a little experiment. I did an episode with a guest. I did an episode on my own. Some people digged the shorter solo, some people digged the guest. So we're doing both. So today you have just me here on Everyone Hates You. And on Wednesday, we will be back with a bit of a longer episode and with a guest sharing their stories of failure and rejection. So, ladies and gentlemen, I'm gonna dive into it. Today we're talking about trolls. What even is a troll? How do you deal with a troll? Should you deal with a troll? These are all the things that I am still trying to figure out. Um, I talked a little bit about in the first episode how I'm putting more effort into social media, different areas of social media. Okay, I've always been okay at Instagram, and for the most part, I find Instagram a bit more of a kinder place than some of the other mediums. I find um I do get mean comments on there. It happens, but not nearly as bad as when I post to other kinds of social media things. So I messed up and I'm apologizing to you guys if anyone saw this and was offended by it. I don't even know if I should apologize or if I need to, to be honest with you, but I handled some hate comments, probably not in the best way. And I do know the best way is to ignore it. I really do. But I find when you get a lot of them, sometimes you just snap. Sometimes you can be having an okay day. You post something and you're like, this is great. And then you just see comment after comment calling you ugly or unfunny and that kind of stuff. And for the most part, I'm good at ignoring it. And if I click on a profile and it's obviously a fake profile, or they have none of their own information, like if it's no profile photo, I don't reply and I don't even bother looking at their photo at their profile. If there's a photo and I look and it's like not of them, then they're obviously using a fake name or it's a private profile. Again, I don't engage because I do know. I watched a video. I watched a video on socials. I probably should have made a note and cited it so you could go watch it. And it was about how a lot of trolls today they will specifically try to start something on someone's wall using a fake profile, so other people kind of jump in. And those are the people that when there is accountability are the ones that get in trouble because they're the ones that have their actual profiles online and can be screenshot and can be shared. So I'm doing better about ignoring it. But the other day it got to me, somebody I posted a clip and somebody kept calling me ugly. And I didn't mention my looks in the clip, and I didn't, I'm not up there saying, hey, I'm hot. Everyone thinks I'm hot. If you know me or if you have listened to enough of my stand-up, you know that that's not how I feel about myself, and that's not the way I was viewed through most of my life. So somebody had posted something about saying, like, oh, you're a five who thinks there's something about my looks, and all I did, and I've done this plenty of times before, is I just replied to them with a photo of themselves. Now I've done this before, and I will say, probably eight out of 10 times, that person just deletes the comment because they're like, oh, I didn't think about that. Um, but this guy doubled down, and again, I should have left it, and he just kept going for the jugular. So I posted that exchange of him calling me ugly and his photo as a main post on my wall. Didn't go the way I had hoped. So generally, when I post on my wall on Facebook, if it's not a real, nobody sees it. It's just my followers that see it. For some reason, this got pushed out to so many people, and all these people came at me, all these men, sorry, no women, all these men came at me and were like, How dare you call him ugly? Like, it's like they didn't even look at what he originally said about me. They just saw a woman saying something about a man's looks, which I didn't say anything. I just posted his photo. That's all I said. No words were used. And they got mad at me. And I did get some comments from women being like, Yeah, you tell him. And I was like, Oh, yeah, I'm telling him. And then I lost a bunch of followers. I think it was like 85 off that like one post alone. And I did get a message from a man that I was pretty rude to. And if that was you, look, time and place, bud. I think when you see a woman getting attacked online, I don't think it's the right time to go into her DMs and be like, you're handling this wrong. This is what women should do online. I wish women knew how to ignore. Like, I get what you're saying, and it's one thing to say, hey, maybe just ignore the trolls. This isn't a good look. But to be like, why do women always do this? Da-da-da. And so I let him have it and he unfollowed my page, which is fine. Again, not everyone needs to be my fan. But I did hear you. I did hear you. And I think the consensus is that people would prefer I just ignored that stuff. And it's hard to ignore it. It really is. So I've done a little bit of a little bit of a deep dive into the whole troll world, if you will, and kind of why it happens and what the best ways to handle it are. So I actually did a little bit of, I looked into kind of the research, and there's actually research showing that women are more likely to get abuse online that's specifically about their gender or their appearance or their sex or their sexual preference. One big study found that women were three times as likely than men to report sexual harassment online, and women who were harassed were much more likely to say they thought their gender was the reason when being targeted. So, what that's saying is it's not saying that men don't get hate. And I don't want you, if you're a man listening, to think that I am saying that because I'm just speaking from the point of view as a woman. So there was also this brilliant study that involved male gamers, and the researchers either used a male or female voice for basically the same teammate, like basically the same skill level. So the men who were worse at the game became more hostile when they thought they were playing against a woman. Well, the better players were actually nicer. So there's at least some evidence for the idea for certain that men get nastier when they feel their status is being threatened. And I think a lot of that times that they feel more of their status is being threatened when it's a woman than when it's a man. Um, it does make you wonder how many horrible comments are less about you and more about the person that's having a terrible night on their sofa. And I do try to remind myself of that a lot. And I remember there was like, I think it was 2017. Um, but I remember reading about this a while back. Sarah Silverman had a man that he replied to something that she wrote on Twitter, and it was, he replied to her like with a very sexist insult. And he wasn't like some anonymous account, right? He did it from his actual profile using his own name. And he had talked openly on his profile about his life. And so, Sarah, before she replied, she went and she looked at his profile. She looked through this guy's timeline and she noticed that, you know, he was going through stuff. He was suffering from severe back pain that had really impeded his life. And instead of like replying angrily or with a joke, she just replied, Hey, mate, are you doing okay? And that really changed the interaction. So that kind of changed the course of like where that could have gone. Um, he ended up apologizing to her and kind of opened up about the fact that he was abused as a child and that he was dealing with so much physical pain and he was just taking it out on strangers in line. Uh she encouraged him to seek support and she asked her followers if anyone could help with his back problems, which I thought pretty cool. A medical consultation later found that he had multiple herniated discs, and she helped rally around him. I also read reports, and I don't know if this is true. I read reports that people are saying she covered his medical treatment. I don't know if that's true and I couldn't find proof of that, but I think that's pretty cool. I think that's pretty cool. And one thing that I do usually do when it comes to like replying to trolls, is I just reply nice. Like I kind of just say something like, Thanks so much for watching, even if it's something mean. And I think I'm just, if I do feel the urge to reply, I think I'm just gonna stick to that, trying to be kind, even if they're trying to be mean. I think sometimes with the Sarah Silverman story, it's good to remind ourselves. Like sometimes, like we're catching people in like the absolute worst moments of their life. Like, I've definitely said things to people when I have not been in a good place that I regret, not online, not publicly. But also, we have to remind ourselves that some of these people don't have interactions with other humans. Some of them are their normal people going about their day who just choose to be a dick online when they get home. But some people don't have anything else other than what they have online. And I do think, you know, I do try to remind myself of that and try to be like the grass is always greener. So another story that I found about a troll that actually really stuck out at me was Mary Beard. Okay. She ended up helping her troll get a job, which, you know what, I don't think I'm there yet. I don't think I'm at that level of maturity that I'm gonna track down my trolls and help them make their life better. But in 2013, um, Mary Beard, a Cambridge classist and TV historian, she started receiving like disgusting sexist tweets from a university student named Oliver Rawlings. He wasn't, again, he wasn't hiding behind some mysterious profile. And that's what I'm talking about today. So maybe the word troll isn't the best word. Because to me, I think troll is anonymous, but maybe I'm wrong in that. So I'm speaking about real people who hate online and don't hide behind a fake profile. So he wasn't hiding, he, you know, was putting himself out there, and all she did was she retweeted his message. And because she had more of a following than he did, his name was out there and he ended up apologizing publicly. And one thing that I want to say, that guy that I posted his photo on Facebook, his friend contacted me, and his friend was a dick to me as well. And his friend was like, Oh, yeah, you think you're cool, like posting this to your thousands of followers. And I was like, Look, your your friend came at me for no reason. Um, and then doubled down and started insulting people on my page who were sticking out for me. So yeah, I got angry. And his friend was like, Well, he literally has like under a hundred followers and you have thousands. So what are you trying to do? And at the time I was like, Fuck you, this guy came at me, but then I thought about it and he is right. I don't feel like I have a lot of followers compared to other people, but that is a lot compared to somebody who's maybe not in show business. And so I did feel a little guilty for that. I felt a little guilty for like the more of the hate that he was getting and more people calling him ugly. But again, he could have just deleted it and didn't double down. But again, I also could have been the mature one. So this Mary Beard story kind of stuck out in me because she was really mature. So Oliver ended up going to Cambridge and apologized to her in person and asked if he could take her for lunch. And the thing that makes the story really interesting is Beard real, Mary Beard realized that whenever Oliver's name was now Googled, that that was the first thing that came up. The horrible tweet that he wrote to her would appear. And she started to feel like because he had apologized to her and said sorry to her face, she didn't feel like that one tweet should be the defining moment in his life. She didn't feel like that should be like the reason why he doesn't get a job or the reason why, you know, somebody doesn't want to date him in the future. She just thought that, you know, he was a young man, he did one stupid thing, and she didn't want to be part of his future being ruined indefinitely. She actually wrote him job references. She actually wrote him job references, and I just think that shows a real sign of maturity. It really does. I think it shows a real sign of maturity. And it's a maturity that I don't have yet, and maybe one day, maybe one day they will. They actually remain in contact. Her attitude was that he did something horrible, but he apologized and he learned from it. She kind of thought that a forever punishment wasn't really the point. And I think that's, I don't know. I think that's pretty, I think that's pretty lovely. And this isn't the only troll story that Mary Beard has. So she's kind of done this before. Um, a different man had been attacking her online and was calling her evil. So he was saying, You're evil, kind of shutting down everything that she posted. And she engaged with him and kind of asked what was going on in his life. And she found out that this man had trouble getting health care. She looked up the information for the healthcare that he needed and she helped him. And she helped him, and I think that's great. And later down the line, she was getting online abuse from other people about something else. And that man actually reached out to her and said, Hey, are you okay? So she was kind to him and he was kind in return. And I do feel like, could you imagine? Could you imagine harassing someone online? And then a year later, they're like, Your job reference? Like, I wonder what goes through those people's mind when they've had this like come to Jesus moment about how the person they're harassing is a human being. And I do think Mary Beard is right in the sense that when they have that come to Jesus moment and they realize, hey, I'm attacking a real human here, maybe I shouldn't do that. Maybe we should give them some grace back. Maybe we should give them some grace back and say, okay, they're also a human, probably going through their worst moment. I don't know how I feel about this yet. So you guys let me know. How do you feel? How do you feel a troll should be handed with? Is ignoring always the best thing, or is forcing accountability ever the right thing to do? So I posted about this. I was excited about this, and it didn't, it didn't play out the way I wanted to. I have been getting trolled. Not I was getting hate for close to a year from a man online who I didn't know. And again, it wasn't a private profile. It was somebody that had their photo up there, had whatever. He left me some awful comments. Let's read some of them. Like it was one of those things where every time I'd post something, he would find it. Like there were videos that I wasn't even tagged in that he would somehow find me. And it was just the typical, it started out with the like, not funny, just loud, that kind of stuff, or like uh trying to find a funny woman, still waiting. Um jokes are mid at best. Fine. So it wasn't anything super personal, wasn't anything like super like you're looking ugly, you die. It wasn't like that. But it was just so much over time that I started to wonder. I was like, why is this guy like doing this to me? Like I was curious, is it just me or is it all women comics? Like, I was really kind of curious, and it kept going on, and or someone give this woman a real crowd and see how fast she bombs. One thing I noticed is that I found pretty interesting is I could post something online, I could post a video online or a thing online, and I would always get all these comments saying, Why do female comedians only talk about sex? Female comics only talk about sex. And the thing is I don't. But those are the clips that get the most comments. And most of the comments are negative about how women only talk about sex, which means the algorithm pushes it even further, which means it goes and gets even more views. And also, like when you comment on a video of a female comic talking about sex, your algorithm's gonna think, wow, you like that. We're gonna show you more videos of female comics talking about sex, and then you're gonna think, oh, all women talk about sex, but that's not it. That's just what you're interacting with. So this troll had said that, and I commented back, being like, hey, I have a lot of videos that aren't about sex. Um, and then he started saying that you'd get canceled in two seconds if you were a man. Things like, cute that you think this is edgy, it's just bitter old lady. Painfully unfunny, second and embarrassment. Not one joke landed. And I wrote, Did you hear the laughter and applause? And he said, Laugh track, it's a laugh track. And I get that a lot. A lot of women do. When we can post a stat where we're absolutely killing, and there's always a comment, laugh track, how much did you pay for the laugh track? How much did you pay for the laugh track? So I started writing this troll back, and I don't know, I don't really okay. I started writing this troll back, and I'm not gonna sit here and say I regret it because I don't necessarily regret it, but I um so I posted on one of his things. I posted and I said, Hey, I have a podcast called Everyone Hates You. You've been hating on me for a while. Would you come do the podcast? This isn't a gotcha moment. I just want to do a short interview, I'll keep your identity hidden kind of thing. And he commented back and was like, I'm in. Any chance to hate you? And I was like, Great. So I ended up going into his DM. Some time went by, okay. About a month went by. I I needed time to organize this podcast. It did not. I have great ideas, and then it takes me way too long to implement them. Okay. So I ended up contacting him on DM and I said, okay, as I said in my comments, I'd love to have you on the podcast. This won't be some big gotcha moment. I'll hide your profile. It's called Everyone Hates You, and I'd really like to know why you hate me. Why do you seek out my stuff to comment? And if it's just me, you do this too. What do you get out of it? We can do it by phone. I won't show your face. Your identity will be hidden. Okay. So he didn't reply for a little bit, but he was still commenting on my stuff. Like somebody kind of jumped in to defend me on something that he had said. They were like, Oh, she's actually really funny, like you're being a hater. And he wrote, She's not gonna fuck you, dude. And I wrote, I might, you don't speak for me, which I thought was hilarious. Um, so he eventually did reply. He replied the next day and he said, You're not funny. You're just a Messandris with a mic. Must be nice making a career off making men your punchline. And I said, It is. Thanks. So is that a yes to the podcast? Which you know, you know what? I was being cheeky. Okay, I was being cheeky, I was being cheeky. Uh, and then I was like, okay, I don't hate men. And I followed, I wanted him to know that. I said, I actually don't hate men though, although you're not doing them any favors. And he said, if a man said the stuff you did, he'd be canceled. And then before I could reply, he said, face it, peaked in high school. Now it's just mean girl cosplay. This would have been such a great, great conversation for the pod. And I should have just said, okay, when can I book you in? But I felt the need to explain to him that I'm not some like popular high school girl. Let's be mean to people now. I was not popular in high school at all. I was teased relentlessly, I was very overweight, and I said, Oh, now I get it. Sir, I was not the bully in high school. I was bullied. I weighed over 200 pounds. I had through food thrown at me even all through college. It was awful. He did not reply. He didn't reply for a little bit. And I noticed that like he also hadn't he stopped commenting on my stuff after that. He stopped commenting hate comments for a little bit. Um and I was like, okay. I still wanted him to do the pod, and I thought it could be a fun moment. And then he actually wrote me back the other day and it kind of went in a direction I was not expecting. So, first of all, he followed me online the other day, and I was like, oh my God, the troll now follows me. Ah, and I was like, great, he's into the podcast. And then I got this message. It's a it's a bit of a longer one. It says, Hi, Michelle, I watched some of your stuff. I even liked a few bits. I can't lie about that. The Michellephant joke actually got me, that's a good bit. That's a joke about how I was bullied in high school. You should do more of that stuff and less of men are trash and men are ugly. I've been working with a therapist. Some of what I said has nothing to do with you. I think I saw what you looked like and assumed some kind of guy hating vibe, but that was probably more about my own stuff. This is not really an apology. I'm just being honest. I think you'd be funnier if you stuck to the self-deprecating and not man hate. Okay. I do appreciate it. It says it's not an apology, but it reads like an apology, right? So it reads like he's sorry. So I just said, I really appreciate you taking the time to watch my stuff. I still love to chat with you on the pod if you're interested. And congrats on the therapy. I know it's not easy. So we wrote back and said, thanks so much. I've been in and out of therapy for a while. I don't think the podcast is a good idea. I do want to say I won't leave hate comments anymore, and I will just DM you if I have a problem. Okay, so I love that he's not going to leave hate comments anymore. I really do. And I do think he's probably gonna watch this because he is still on my followers list. Um, I didn't reply to that because what do you say? Like, I don't want your comments if you have a problem with my stuff. Like, just don't watch it. That's how I feel. So a couple days went by and he just wrote, Hey, how are you? Okay, I didn't reply to that because now I feel like I'm in a situation where he wants to be friends. And I don't think we could go from like, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I have problems, be my friend. I don't think that's gonna happen. So I'm gonna leave it. If he starts writing hate stuff again, fine. I will let it go. Um, but he is a follower now. And I really hope, I really hope, I really hope that maybe he has learned a little bit from this because I know that I have learned a little bit from this. I really have. I've learned a little bit. I've learned to ignore the trolls. I would love to get somebody that hates me on my podcast, though. I really would. So if you are a longtime hater and you can prove that it is you that has been leaving some comments, message me and I will get you on the pod. I guess in conclusion, I think that some things with trolls is it's easy to forget that there's an actual person on the other end of the comment. Okay. And I'm trying to, I touched on earlier that I am trying to remind myself of that. But like sometimes that person's lonely and sometimes they're angry and sometimes they are having a terrible day. And sometimes it is just an asshole with Wi-Fi. You don't have to excuse horrible behavior. You guys can do what you want. But maybe it is worth kind of remembering that nobody is at their best when they're typing. You suck, women aren't funny at 2 a.m. in the morning, and they have a profile photo of a car. I think be kind online where you can. And I think for me, I always uh use that as a way to be like, be kind online. So I won't troll, but I I'm gonna say that it goes back ways. It goes both ways. I'm gonna say for me, be kind online is going to also reflect how I interact with those haters, which is either going to be not replying or reply with kindness. But if you can't be kind, at least be original. And saying women aren't funny is not original, and telling me I have a laugh track is not original. So let's try to get some better comments. All the trolls listening, thank you so much for your engagement. If you hate me, that's fine. I think I'm done trying to make the world love me. I really am. I say that now, but next week I'll be back crying, being like, why doesn't everyone like me? Um, but thanks for listening. If you hated it, please leave a comment. Apparently, that's excellent for my algorithm. Have a great day. Thanks for coming in to the first uh Monday of Everyone Hates You. Like I said, Mondays and Fridays are just gonna be me chatting. I'm gonna cut try to come up with some little segments. If you guys have a story of failure or rejection, please DM me at Michelle's Funny on social media. Thanks for listening. And remember everyone hates you!