How Mean Can You Be To Online Strangers?

Everyone gets a little sassy online. But what are the rules for just how mean you can get?

I’ve always prided myself in being a nice person. Maybe I’m annoying, narcissistic, and I make too many jokes about gooning, but I’m not mean. At least I didn’t think I was mean.

But one day, I was mean.

This was a few years ago. I was scrolling Twitter and saw a post that encapsulated a particular pet peeve of mine. I had no beef with the person who posted it- I didn’t know anything about her other than the fact that she was a big account. So I screenshotted it and tweeted about how this type of thing drove me nuts. I made sure not to include any personal attacks (I had no reason to attack her personally anyway. Like I said, I didn’t know her at all.) My reason for screenshotting instead of quote-tweeting was that the quote-tweet wouldn’t have made sense in context. I didn’t anticipate that the person I was screenshotting would ever see my tweet, or care. At the time, I was a relatively small account, and she had tens of thousands of followers. It felt like making a joke about Hillary Clinton or Sabrina Carpenter (yes, I am a big fan of women—I can name two of them.)

My tweet actually wound up going a bit viral. The woman I screenshotted did, in fact, see it. She reached out to me and asked me to delete it, letting me know that it was clear I hadn’t meant it to be hateful, but that it opened her up to people who were going to be hateful. She was surprisingly cool about it. I felt…absolutely awful. I apologized, deleted, and the happy ending was that we followed each other and she turned out to be a lovely, smart and interesting person who is also a really funny poster. But the interaction taught me something, which was that even big accounts on Twitter are still just regular people. You can still hurt their feelings. At the time, I didn’t anticipate that I might be in her shoes one day.

But alas, I was. When I crossed 10,000 followers on Twitter, I suddenly experienced lots of people being super mean for seemingly no reason. The first one that sticks out to me was when I made a joke about bread in Italy being magic and food in America being nuclear waste (the joke was on the people who say this unironically.) It felt like a pretty ho-hum joke, but my mentions were flooded with people accusing me of simping for Big Food, and it eventually culminated in me having to deny being a “Monsanto sockpuppet.” (2005 called and they want their boogeyman back.)

It wasn’t really that big of a deal in hindsight, but the fact that I tweeted something pretty general and impersonal and got attacked on a very personal level felt disproportionate. It was also just…so much. I wound up panicking, beating myself up for ever starting this stupid “CHH” thing. Eventually, I calmed down but took a few days off Twitter to regroup. And when I returned, I continued to get into these stupid fights and every fight made me a bit more resilient. Now, I can have my outfit photos reposted to Eating Disorder Twitter for teenage girls to discuss how fat my thighs are, and it doesn’t really get to me. Or I can have two separate incidents where anti-race-mixing Twitter goes after me for being in an “interracial marriage” (the first accusation was about my husband being Black, the second was about me being Asian. We are both white, but I have straight dark hair and he has dark olive skin. Many such cases!)

That’s not to say haters never get to me. I randomly had a guy respond to a fairly innocuous tweet, gleefully predicting that my husband would divorce me within three years. This felt insanely personal and bizarre, and a quick peruse of his Twitter account showed me that he was a very specific type of guy: a former theater kid who identifies as a temporarily embarrassed high school bully. The type of person who will post about some virtuous leftist cause while calling anyone who disagrees a r-slurred f-slur. Anyway, after blocking him I went down a rabbit hole of him and his weird buddies who had a separate thread about how annoying I was (I feel the need to point out that most of these people followed me.) I went on a blocking spree, but the whole thing made me feel icky. Weirdly, being called a flat-chested post-wall slut by a groyper felt less hurtful than this, because it just felt so catty and personal. Remember, I was the girl voted off her middle school lunch table a la Survivor. It brought up some shit for me!

The funny part of this interaction was that one person involved in the blocking spree later complained that I had blocked him. “If I had 25,000 followers, I wouldn’t have the time to comb through threads to block people for lightly criticizing me,” he said. (The fact that I even saw this tweet meant that not only did I have the time to comb through threads about me, but I had the time to check in on someone who blocked me to see if they were malding over it.)

Free time or not, clearly, account size is a big factor in how mean you’re allowed to be. When I was mean to the aforementioned Big Account woman, I did it because I didn’t think she was small enough to care. I was shocked to discover that big accounts are real people, and evidently I learned this first-hand too. Perhaps the guy who threatened me with divorce suffered from the same delusion I once did—he saw that I had a lot of followers, and forgot that I was a real person. And while you might say, “Of course big accounts are real people,” there’s still a limit to that statement. If Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson says something stupid, you probably feel like it’s fine to call them dumbasses. Nobody is afraid of “cyber bullying” Donald Trump. But in this era of Internet micro-celebrities, at what point does it cross over into just being a massive douche to a regular person with a Twitter account?

I’ve realized that the meanness dynamics on Twitter (or really, any online space) boil down to three rules: