"I think the world owes Robin Williams' daughter an apology."

By REBECCA SPARROW

I made the mistake of Googling two words last night:  “Zelda Williams”.

And I wish I hadn’t.

Over dinner a friend had told me that Robin William’s daughter Zelda had written a poignant and touching  message to her father’s fans. I’d been told that she’d said that despite how much she was hurting that knowing how much the world truly loved her father was helping a little with her family’s grief.

So last night I poured myself a cup of tea, climbed into bed and Googled Zelda’s name. Hoping to read the message. Hoping to be comforted that she was in turn feeling comforted by the outpouring of love and respect and admiration for her dad around the world. But that’s not what I read. What I read when I Googled Zelda’s name didn’t just break my heart for a girl I don’t know. In that moment it broke my spirit.

Because what dominated my search was the news that last night Zelda Williams had been harassed by online trolls so badly she has quit all her social media accounts.

Within 48 hours of her father dying,  people were sending Zelda Wiliams fake photos of her father’s dead body.

Take a moment and just read that sentence again.

But that’s not all. Others had started attacking the grieving 25-year-old, writing unspeakably cruel things about her father and questioning Zelda’s love for her dad because apparently (according to them) she didn’t have enough photos of the comic genius on her Instagram account.

Is this what we have become?

That’s what I’ve been feeling and thinking ever since I read that story last night.

Is this what we have become as human beings?

Right now, in terms of behaving with a modicum of decency, of humanity, it feels like we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel.

A woman loses her father in desperately sad circumstances and people go online and tell her her father was a shit comedian. That they hated his guts. That the world is glad he’s gone. And don’t even get me started on the photos.

It’s easy to dismiss this  sick, despicable behaviour as that of a fringe group.  We sigh and shake our heads in despair at these ‘online trolls’ – those anti-social cyber lurkers who are society’s misfits.  The type of who would taunt Charlotte Dawson to hang herself. The type who would write the most hurtful and cruel comments to a young woman grieving her father.

We act as though they are so far removed from us – a sick group of people fuelled by hate.

And yet.

The vast majority of cruelty and viciousness and spite being dished out online on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and online commenting forums is being done so by average people. Your work colleague.  The woman in your sister’s mothers group.  That old school friend.  Average people who feel like a keyboard and a screen name give them the – what? – the freedom, the chance, the window of opportunity to say what they really think to someone they don’t know? The chance to vent an ugly opinion with no consequences. The chance to deliver the on-line equivalent of a king hit.

Are we all really that full of hate?

Because debate, I’m all for. A robust discussion. A disagreement online. Bring it on.

But so often what I’m seeing from my side of the computer, as an online writer and columnist of 11 years is that average people  are hitting the keyboard and secretly saying things online they would never dream of saying in real life.

Words, I know, they are humiliated and ashamed to own when the torch beam lands on them. When they are outed.

It’s enough.

We’re better than this. All of us.

And to Zelda Williams I say this on behalf of all your father’s Australian fans: I’m so very, very sorry. Your father was a little bit of magic in this world. And he’ll be missed.