I’m going to tell you all a story and hope that it might reach the right eyes. Being off Tumblr for a while pushed me onto Twitter and I simply can’t stop myself speaking out about the bullying that goes on there, and a lot of it from my own fanbase.
Warning: it’s not a particularly nice story and discusses the aftermath of bullying so please don’t read if it’s triggering for you.
A few years back when Snapchat was heavily used, a girl in my year at school was obsessed with a famous singer (you can guess who). She would constantly put pictures and videos on her Snapchat of the singers latest pap pictures, she would post things about him that it would take five minutes to disprove, and she would talk about him like she actually knew him (she once pretended she did). Her best friend would tell the popular group about it in an attempt to find some kind of common ground.
Anyway… a couple of the girls in the bitchy group in our year asked for her Snapchat, pretending to want to be her friend. They would lurk there, watching her stories and screenshotting them to send them around the year. They actually laughed that her snap score was less than 10, meaning it was very unlikely she actually had friends to talk to on there.
Other schools found out, and before we knew it, this girl was known as the local freak. Screenshots were being sent around groupchats, people were making comments about her whenever they could, and she was subjected to some of the worst online bullying I have ever witnessed.
A few of us didn’t see the point in the bullying. To us, she wasn’t doing any harm to anyone by simply having a hero. Our problem was, we knew if we spoke out we might’ve ended up being classed as the same as her.*
After almost two years of relentless bullying, she was diagnosed with cancer and passed away within six weeks. Our school asked us all to attend the funeral and when we did, we discovered that she was being raised by her aunt because her father had passed away and her mother was an alcoholic.
Being obsessed with that singer was the only thing she had and in the last few years of her life bullies stripped the enjoyment out of that for her.
I think about her often. I wonder if I had said something would it have made a difference. If I’d called the bullies out instead of just sitting back and thinking to myself that it was wrong could I have stopped them? I think about the feeling she must’ve felt when she saw another person making fun of her online.
Mostly, I think of the speech her aunt gave at the funeral. She didn’t directly mention the bullying, although I’m sure she knew it was happening, but she did say, “the only part that makes this easier is knowing you were relieved when they told you it wasn’t curable.”
I think about that one sentence every day of my life.
To the people who are using woso as a disguise for your own inability to be anything but a bully, shame on you.
These players fought their entire careers to finally be recognised as something other than Sunday league football players and you are turning that recognition into something negative.
What other people do doesn’t impact you. Not one bit. Sure, sometimes I roll my eyes when I see a post, but who actually cares? Apart from your little group of followers who use your page as somewhere to bully, who cares? Do you think Putellas or Williamson or Mead or Popp or James or Kerr or anyone, read your tweets and think “that’s the kind of fan I want” because they don’t.
You’re insulting their intelligence to assume that they weren’t switched on enough to know that when they became bigger, they would have the positives and the negatives of fame. That’s why slow growth and investment were so crucial before the Euros, clubs and national teams knew they had to have things in place to help players deal with the fame that was long overdue: media training, psychology experts, and exposure to press.
There are so many issues you could be vocal about in woso. Pay, access to facilities, scheduling, countries where women’s footballers are still being subjected to coercive control, abuse, and being unpaid for their contribution to their country. Your platform could be used to educate people on these issues, but instead you would rather use it to show a couple of hundred people a screenshot of someone you have decided should become a target.
Just don’t bully, for goodness sake.
*In an attempt to not be classed the same as her, we sat back while she lived through hell in what we didn’t know were the final two years of her life. She never once disrespected the people bullying her, and now that I’m older I realise that I’d do anything to go back and be classed the same as her because to be a good person is so much better than to be someone who facilitates a bully.
turnnoffyourmind
andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
blakekathryn
baratheonpilled
kianamaiart
germansingergirl
theartofmadeline
