i hate you, it's ruining my life

on the people who will work hard to flatter you with their time

I read an article a while ago on how all the big social media influencers thrive on hate. I can’t find the link for it, but its main point was basically that haters will engage much more quickly and with more passion than any fan. I talked about this on Instagram around this time last year and a lot of the comments were quite dismissive of my point because I mentioned the same example the article departed from. Kylie Jenner built her empire from not only reality tv fame and viral lip kits, but on the back of having an impressive engagement in her account that is followed by millions. So by hating on Kylie on my post about how hating on Kylie produces a lot of engagement they kind of proved my point?

The engagement of someone who is seen as inspirational in any kind of way - the infamous “lifestyle bloggers” - is not sustained merely by the fans who buy their endorsed products or the like, but mostly by those who hate them, and who turn hating them into a personality trait while still actively engaging with their posts. They will comment on the influencers’ own pages as well as under any publication about them. While complaining that, say, Rolling Stone posts about Kim Kardashian’s shape wear brand way too often for a music magazine, the haters make an argument for the RS social media team to keep on posting about it since it clearly produces a reaction.

It doesn’t matter if the strategy is gross and depressing: it produces clicks, it makes actual money.

And then there’s Taylor Swift. Much has been said about the mighty swifties and how you wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of their many campaigns and collective efforts. They support the causes that are dear to Taylor, they organise to promote change and in situations of crisis they will respond more quickly than many government officials. We are probably all in agreement that they are a force to be reckoned with.

Taylor’s haters, though. They are dedicated. They are fast. They are vicious. They apparently have not much else to do. “Taylor Swift fans cause seismic activity in Edinburgh”, reports The Guardian and several other media outlets. “Get rid of her”, says a random Instagram user. “Taylor Swift donation enables Cardiff food bank to buy lorry full of supplies”; “So what? She’s a billionaire”, complains another.

I am not saying that rich, famous people are impervious to criticism, but there’s no denying that the hate feeds on itself and that people who are adored on social media are usually hated with at least equal measure. This is impressive to me because I cannot make sense of caring this much, spending this much energy on people I supposedly don’t like. It’s just an alien feeling.

And then there’s little old me. I’ve been on social media “creating content” (if that even means anything) since 2019. I talk about books and academic life. Up until recently I mostly talked about English Literature in Brazilian Portuguese, so yes, a bit niche. I’m not an influencer, I’m just a person on the internet. And yet.

I’ve dealt with more weirdos than I feel is justified by my level of exposure. So here’s an abridged history of my interactions with internet haters: I’ve had a stalker who harassed me, my friends, and my family, and then someone with stalker-like behaviour showed up as soon as the other other piped down a bit (not sure I’d class her as a full on stalker though she’s done quite a few scary/creepy things, but still not as bad as the first one, I guess?). I’ve had people who only followed me to make rude/negative comments, who sent me long DMs telling me everything that was wrong with anything I posted. I’ve had someone using my social media profile to spread a lie about me at my workplace.

After this last instance of internet madness, I took a break from social media and experimented with having different levels of engagement with it. I deactivated my Instagram. I joined and abandoned TikTok. I archived all my YouTube videos. I’ve been wary of sharing personal things online. But ultimately, I felt like I needed a Sarah-telling-off-Jareth-in-Labyrinth moment, because why the hell am I changing my whole life and the way I communicate with others because of a person who will not even dare to show their own face to lie about me?

Should I really be making myself smaller for someone who hates me? For a nameless, faceless coward? So maybe I was looking at this the wrong way. I sometimes wondered if I was doing something wrong to attract unhinged people while minding my own business. To be fair though, I also made some of my best friends online. So what does it come down to?

In an article titled “The Most ‘Engaging’ Social Media Content Is The Worst For You”, Sarah Oh asks:

The negative effects of online abuse and disinformation on people are clear, so why do the largest platforms appear to be doing the bare minimum to keep people safe and why do they appear indifferent toward finding solutions? It comes down to a fundamental flaw in the way social media platforms have operated from the beginning: they believe engagement is everything.

She goes on to report that while some social media platforms like Facebook trialed alternative formats where the quality of engagement mattered just as much as engagement itself, those were soon abandoned as they didn’t produce the same results. While advertisers are not interested in investing in the most problematic areas of the internet in fear of damaging their brands, if you measure the temperature by the kind of advice people will give creators on TikTok and Instagram, it seems that things are not actually changing for the better. It will not take you too long to find someone advising you not to delete hate comments as platforms will not differentiate between those and the nicer ones: engagement is engagement, and everything is content.

There’s a lot of scholarship on the ways in which hate speech spreads on social media, but I’m also invested in learning more about the workings of the brains of the strange creatures who reportedly cannot stand you, but will create burner profiles if you block them.

My latest one, the little darling who inspired this piece, created a YouTube account to harass me mere hours after I returned to that platform (with a book haul video, of all things!). Their comment was almost poetic in its levels of nonsensical babbling.

I have been working on making space for my online presence in English, not just because I have friends who are not Portuguese speakers that I want to have access to the things I post, but also because that way I’ll hopefully reach new audiences as well. That does not mean I won’t be posting in my first language, ever. That does not mean I’m not proud of who I am. On the contrary. The English language is just as mine as anyone else’s: I earn a living by teaching literature in English. It is also in English that I publish my research on some of the most prestigious journals in my area. My accent is my own - an amalgamation of all the books that I read, all the teachers that taught me, all the films that I watched. But ultimately, my accent is none of your business.

I’m so happy with the person that I am, I worked very hard to get to be her.

While I’m mostly just baffled by it, I do also feel sorry for someone so plagued by the one-sidedness of parasocial relationships that they will constantly think and be bothered about people who don’t even know who they are. One can only hope they find something more entertaining to do. So since we’re talking about YouTube, here’s a list of zero skill hobbies for all people with a little too much time on their hands to try.