Negative Comments on Social Media

By Teaantoast @teaantoastblog
A lovely friend on mine, Beckie Eschle, wrote a blog post recently about reacting to negative comments and it got me thinking. Beckie is a lovely girl, I've known her for around 7 years now and she is beautiful, she has a big heart, she cares for people, she's kind and she's also incredibly brave and inspirational. She talks very openly on her blog about mental health and shares tips and tricks that are working for her in order to help others - that's pretty awesome in itself!!

When I read that someone left her negative comments, it made me really angry. If they knew her, they wouldn't even think of associating those comments with her. I know that negative comments are a regular thing on social media and I always thought it was amongst the younger community, those who are still in school. But from opening my eyes a little and reading comments on friends instagram accounts, youtube comments and blog comments, it's really not just the younger community. I've seen women in their 40's leave really vile, nasty comments to people who they don't even know.

Having a blog, youtube channel, tumble, whatever it is, whether that be about fashion, museums or animals is a brave thing to do. You're putting your interests, views, passions, feelings out there on the table for people to read. This is going to naturally generate a reaction of some sort and I understand that. But what I don't understand is why people need to put these down. We're human, we disagree with other people. But there is a difference between being constructive and being destructive. Saying someone's cake they've spent hours baking looks like horse shit and you'll never eat it is different to recommending a different way of decorating the cake or using a different color of icing next time.

I myself have been honest about bulimia and depression in the past on my blog, my battle was all about myself and how I felt about me. If I hadn't of shared that with my blog readers and someone left a comment on one of my blog posts that was about my body shape or my looks that would have been destroying and would have made my battle 10 times harder. I'd have had others opinions bringing me down too, opinions of people who didn't even know me bringing me down.

The people that leave negative comments are clearly going through something in their personal lives in order to feel the need to bring others down. No one knows that the other person is going through.

Everyone will have their own way of dealing with negative comments and I know dealing with them is easier said than done. Jaclyn Hill made a video on this and I feel like she got it bang on, I know there are other well known bloggers such as Victoria from In The Frow who also wrote a blog post on dealing with negative comments which I also thought was a good read. It's a subject that is coming up more often and it's great that people are talking about it but it just shouldn't be happening full stop.

Social media is growing, blogging is 10 times bigger now than when I first started. It's still no excuse for people to be nasty.


Think before commenting, would you say that to this persons face? If not, don't even bother commenting it.