Trolls, haters & Masterchef.

At the peak of her international fame, in the middle of her famous portrayal of Sarah Palin, her starring role on 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live, Tina Fey won a handful of Golden Globe awards. I can still remember her speech.

She said: “If you ever start to feel too good about yourself, they have this thing called the Internet. You can find a lot of people there who don’t like you.” She then dedicated her award to  “Babsonlacrosse, Dlanefan and Cougarletter”, telling them to “suck it”.

In the press room afterwards, Tina explained  these were real names of real online haters who had made repeated comments about her on the LA Times website in particular.

I’ve never forgotten that. It was hilarious and true.

I try very hard to stay away from trolls and haters and the bile they sometimes like to unleash – often anonymously. They only very rarely come here. I’d say we delete maybe half a dozen nasty comments PER MONTH. Which is something to be proud of given the size of MM and the number of comments.

However. I recently made the mistake of being accidentally sucked into the vortex of some haters and once you start reading hideous things about yourself?  It is surprisingly difficult to stop. Like looking at a car crash as you drive past, knowing you shouldn’t but not being able to look away.

I looked away and life is better.

Poor Joanne from Masterchef. According to Fairfax:

Channel Ten has threatened to ban MasterChef fans from posting comments on its official program website in the wake of a backlash against unpopular contestant Joanne Zalm.

The Sydney mother-of-two has become the target of an online hate campaign with everything from her cooking skills to her looks and frequent outbursts of on-screen emotion coming in for criticism.

Some media reports claim even physical threats have been made against her on social networking sites including Facebook, where groups such as the ‘Get rid of Joanne Zalm fanclub’ have been formed.[NOTE: I am not going to repeat the abusive comments that appeared on the site because that is not productive]

 

People, it’s a cooking show. A COOKING SHOW. Joanne is a person. A woman. A mother of two little girls. She’s not a character on a TV show. She’s not an actor playing a part.

I’m going to admit that in the privacy of my lounge room, I have made the odd disparaging comment about various people on TV. My bad. But that is quite different to grabbing your laptop and spewing abusive bile into a public forum.

Why do people do this? Would they ever say that kind of thing to someone’s face? Do they think it’s clever or funny? Does it make them feel better about themselves to put someone else down or try to make them feel like crap?

One of my favourite programs is Q&A on ABC1. After watching almost every episode since it began a year or so ago, I have been asked to appear as part of the panel next Monday.

Dear Internet, I am terrified. It’s not the live nature of TV that’s making me nervous, nor is it the prospect of having to discuss subjects that are – how can I put this – not in my realm of expertise……

Nope. All that, I can handle. If I make a goose of myself because I don’t know something, I’m fine with that.

What fills me with terror is the thought of the twitter stream that is so much a part of watching Q&A for many people. There are thousands of Q&A tweets commenting about the program in real time and 140 characters while it’s on. Many of them are witty and erudite. More are nasty and horrible.

Why? Why are we so intent on stamping out bullies in our playgrounds and cyber bullies among teens and yet so willing to allow a culture of online bullying to flourish among adults?

UPDATE:  The influx of trolls onto this post has reluctantly forced me to delete a few threads and turn off comments last night (sorry if yours was collateral damage). And I’m not even kidding.

I’m going to try and open them again. Let’s see how it goes.

And I’m not doing Q&A next Monday after all. Got rightly bumped. Given the turn of events, it’s going to be a heavy hitting political panel and while a teeny bit of me is disappointed, a much bigger part is relieved.