Edel Coffey: Online abuse and the attitudes that spawn it should exist in the past

Kelly Brook: at the receiving end of online misogyny for years. Pic: Ian West/PA Wire

Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed a looping narrative coming from various women at various stages of their careers in the media. The singer Lizzo spoke passionately on stage about how cruel online trolling can be. At a recent gig, she held up a sign that one of her fans had made.

‘I’m sorry people on Twitter suck,’ it read. ‘You are beautiful and special.’

While holding up the sign, Lizzo said she has been told that she should just accept the kind of online abuse she suffers about her body comes with the territory of being a s music superstar. However, she argued, ‘it’s not normal, it isn’t fair, it isn’t right… it should never come with the territory of being a person, a human being.’ 

In a newspaper interview, the beautiful TV presenter Kelly Brook spoke about what it was like to be a young woman in the lad culture of the nineties and early noughties, and how she is happiest now as a radio presenter because people can’t see her, because people are not thinking about what she looks like.

When she put on weight during lockdown, online commenters told her she was ‘unsexy’ and ‘past it.’ Then last week, pop star Louise Redknapp spoke about her experiences of being famous in pre-social media and how she deals with social media now. 

The former Eternal singer told BBC’s Woman’s Hour show, “everyone had an opinion on you back then, but you didn’t get to hear it… now we’re in a world where you’re not hidden from anything. You get to read and see everything and all opinions are laid out in front of you.” And it’s true.

If internet trolls wrote to newspaper letters pages, maybe one letter from the masses of comments would be published. But online, we get to see each and every spurious, half-formed opinion.

I googled myself, once, years ago. I was in my twenties and remember turning cold as I discovered the nasty comments that strangers had felt compelled to write. 

I was shook and upset for days and vowed never to google myself again. And I never have done. I am that person who tries not to read anything about myself. I’ve never looked at my Amazon reviews. I don’t check my Goodreads ratings. I believe everyone is entitled to their opinion but I also believe that I am entitled not to know those opinions. I subscribe to the Marian Keyes school of thinking, which is what other people think of me is none of my business.

I really hope that in twenty years’ time (or hopefully sooner) we will look back on this era the way we look back on the lad culture of the nineties, as something mind-boggling, akin to mobs attending public executions.

Edel Coffey: have we amused ourselves to death again? Picture: Bríd O'Donovan

The practice of strangers saying nasty things about anyone feels like something that should exist in the past, not in a progressive mature society. It’s something we should read about in history books and shake our heads at and say, imagine people used to live like that. I still think about Chris Evans asking Victoria Beckham to stand on a weighing scales live on his TFI Friday television show in 1999, shortly after she had given birth to her baby, Brooklyn. We’d never do that now, I think. Thankfully we’ve moved on from that kind of insensitive engagement with women’s bodies, haven’t we?

While we wouldn’t dream of addressing a celebrity’s post-baby weight in any form, particularly not by asking her to stand on a weighing scales, we do still passively accept the practice of hundreds of thousands of stinging comments swarming people’s social media accounts about how they look, what kind of parent they are, how they are too sexy or too fat or too frumpy or too everything. We throw our hands up and say it’s too late to do anything, the horse has bolted, how can we possibly hold people on the internet accountable to the same standards we apply to other publishing media or even to everyday standards of courtesy?

When I was a young journalism student, I read a book called Amusing Ourselves To Death. It was a seminal work about how we had naively embraced the new medium of television, walked into it with our eyes closed, and suffered much as a result. The one positive the book offered was that we would never walk into a new medium in the same way again. We would learn from our mistakes. And yet, here we are, having blindly stumbled through the world wide web and found ourselves in the cesspit of social media comments. We are now stumbling into Chat GPT and AI too, wondering where it all might end.

In her Instagram post about cruel online commenters, Lizzo wrote: “If the internet was limited and one comment took 24 hours to post, I wonder what social media would be like.” It’s an interesting question, maybe one worth asking the next time we go to post something online. If you could say just one thing, would you be cruel or would you be kind? As Lizzo says, “minding your business is free”.