This is about hate on the Internet and the experience I had with it back in April. Enjoy?:
On April 22, I came home to 300 emails saying that I had new comments on my video “Re: My Life in 6 Words”. Upon seeing this, I involuntarily whispered a series of swears under my breath. I couldn’t believe it. I had been waiting for this massive amount of emails ever since I started uploading videos on to YouTube, because it serves as an indication that one of your videos is receiving an influx of views. When I checked to see if this was real, and not just some mistake on the site’s part, I learned that not only did I have 300 new comments, but the video had already been viewed more than 10,000 times since I left for school.
Earlier that month, I had been asked by ‘micahsamaniac’, a fellow YouTuber, to post a response to his video “My Life in 6 Words.” At first, I thought the whole concept of summing up life in a mere six words was a pretty challenging and stupid one. I mean, come on. Can you realistically sum your life up in six words without leaving a lot of things out? I soon realized that posting a response would give me more exposure, so I eventually came up with a lame response to his video, recorded myself saying it, and uploaded the video as a response to his. Several weeks later, Micah’s video was featured on the front page of YouTube. Videos that are featured tend to get hundreds of thousands of views before they move down the list and then finally disappear back into obscurity. His video had already received a whopping 200,000 views by the time I found out about his feature.
But I was still confused as to why I was getting so many views. I clicked on the link to his video. When the page loaded, I saw my face in black and white on the side of the screen at the very top of the related videos section of the page. Once people had finished watching Micah’s video, they started looking for responses. Mine was the first one that they saw, which explained why I was receiving so many views. When I figured all of this out, my heart started racing. I gazed at my computer in a euphoric state for a couple minutes, mouth agape. After my euphoria faded, I checked to see what some of my comments were. Unfortunately, not a lot of people responded well to the idea of summing up one’s life in six words. Micah’s video had 2 stars out of 5, which symbolized that he was NOT wanted on the front page. After posting hate comments on his video, the legion of haters spread to my response and started posting hate comments there. About 50% of the comments posted on my response were hate comments. In particular, there were a lot of comments that called me a fag, a homo, gay, etc. I figured that I would get a few of these, but I ended up receiving a lot more than I expected.
At first, I took all the hate comments as one big joke. I mean, come on. Can you REALLY assess someone’s sexuality just by watching them say six words? I responded to about a quarter of these comments in a sarcastic fashion. These people weren’t expecting me to comment back, but I did.
xsatanx666: wat a fag
ofarevolution441: Really? Thanks for the info.
Yet even after my constant replies, the hate continued. After about a half hour of replying, responding to all of the comments became an umbrage. The haters started to get more creative and personal with their insults, and on top of that, the hate started to proliferate to my other videos as if it were a virus. Although there were some people that were supporting me, the hate actually started to personally affect me. I left a comment saying that I was done, set the video to private so no one could see it, and then took the video down altogether. I briefly considered deleting my account, but once the video was gone, the haters left as well. What remained were new friends that offered me support. That’s the one positive thing that I gained from this experience.
The fact that so many people were tossing around the words ‘gay’ and ‘fag’ just absolutely disgusted me. I’m not gay, and I felt offended to be mislabeled. Straight people don’t like to be called gay because it makes them feel less confident in their own sexuality. Gay people don’t like being called fags because it’s insulting. And yet, it happened. Since that whole experience, I haven’t received one ounce of hate.
The Internet: the world’s hip, new vehicle of communication, commerce, and entertainment. I, personally, am on the Internet for about 4 hours a day checking various websites for various reasons. The majority of my time is spent on YouTube, a video sharing network where I’ve managed to garner over 700 regular viewers. The Internet has become involved in my daily routine, as it has for millions of other teenagers and adults around the world. But recently, I’ve realized that the Internet is not the utopia that I first thought it was when I was first connected back in early 2006. The Internet, as it turns out, is a haven for racism and hate.
The reason that I think the Internet is so chockfull of hate is because it’s a medium through which people can express opinions and ideas freely. There is no such thing as law on the Internet, there are no restrictions on what you can put on the Internet. People can block websites to prevent seeing things they don’t want to see, but it still exists for the rest of the world to see. Since so many people use the Internet, many people can be exposed to racist and hateful ideas and spread them.
The Internet has opened the doors for communication. Long-distance communication in the human race has never been faster than it is today. This also means that the communication of ideas are spreading faster than ever. These ideas can be positive, but they can be negative. One of these ideas seems to be that you can say racist and hateful things on the Internet without any major backlash. The bad thing (although I guess it can sometimes be a good thing) about the Internet is that you can make various accounts on various websites, say malevolent things, and then delete the accounts. Maybe the worst thing that could happen to you is a coworker could track you down and tell the boss that you‘re doing this, possibly resulting in the loss of your job and the disrespect of your peers. But this doesn’t occur that often, although I think it should. Your identity can potentially remain a COMPLETE secret as you type controversial things. Upon further inspection of the YouTube accounts that posted the hateful comments on my video, I found blank pages that didn’t give any information on the person. I find this as sheer cowardice. These people that hide behind safety nets and throw stones are the definition of cowards. Freedom of speech does mean that people can say what they want, when they want, but there are boundaries. Now, I don’t want this country to turn into an Orwellian dystopia, so I don’t want freedom of speech to have strict exceptions. But I believe that there should be compassion for the people that face being talked behind their backs every day.
The Internet provides evidence that hate is stronger than it’s ever been because it provides fast communication of ideas, there’s no large backlash if you do post hateful remarks or construct hate websites, and it’s even affected innocent people like me. The problem with hate on the Internet is that not a lot can be done to stop it. There is no president of the Internet.
