The Dark Side of Twitter and Social Media

You don’t really hear much about the “dark side” of Twitter and social media in general. And its certainly nice to stay positive and only hear about good things. Like how Twitter was used for awesome fundraising events, or super funny parody accounts (check out the latest with @AmazonDrone) and of course about all of the massive amounts of information that is exchanged in just minutes. You sometimes hear about how people tweet out the wrong newsbits in the race to be the “first” on the scene, like what happen in Boston earlier this year. But do you hear much about how Twitter, or social media, can literally change (ruin) people’s lives?

Not so much. But it does happen.

In fact, it just happened to a friend of mine in the outdoor world. I won’t name names, but those in that world know who I’m talking about. This person, a woman, had tweeted about her hunt along with a picture. The picture wasn’t grotesque, like some news outlets sensationalized it to be. It was your typical after-the-hunt photo. Or what some call in the industry – the hero shot.

But one person who has a gazillion followers, took offense to the picture and re-tweeted it. From there, its a simple case of addition:  large amount of followers PLUS a polarizing topic PLUS a photo with a smiling, attractive woman EQUALS twitter death hail storm.

It gained momentum so much so that it spawned many news outlets to pick it up – along with two petitions, a negative Facebook page and death threats piling up on death threats the likes that would make your skin crawl.

All from a single tweet.

In this case, the negative definitely received more attention than the positive – you can thank our news outlets for that. The negative being anti-hunting crowds gaining popularity with their DIE, BITCH, DIE mantra and the positive being the money that was earned for that area and conservation efforts that were secured because of this hunt. But no news outlet cares about that side of it. Bring on the death threats! We want to fan the fire of those!

In fact, this debate heated up so much that the haters found another woman with a similar name and started sending her death threats on Twitter as well. She tried tweeting back saying she wasn’t the right person, but it seemed people just didn’t care. Its almost as if people WANT to tweet out death threats to fellow human beings.

I debated writing this post because I know the consequences. I will probably receive nasty comments on the post and nasty tweets in my inbox – which is one of the reasons why I didn’t name this person.

But its wrong, people. As a human being, its wrong to use Twitter or any form of social media to bully or threaten others. There are stands of mothers who are fighting online bullying – so what is this you haters are teaching kids? You are obviously pro cyber bullying. You are teaching that if you don’t like someone, you attack them online. That will show them. You attack them so fierce and so much, bots take their Facebook page down. You continually send threats so real about their family, their kids, their loved ones, that they live in fear.

Think about it before you tweet or post: the message you are sending, the negative karma you are putting out into the world, whatever you believe, does it really need to be said?