Remember those vindictive trolls who interrupted Beth Tweddle’s Sky Sports web chat last month to tell her she was ‘pig ugly’ and that she looked like Lord Voldemort? Well, Beth has a message for them – and it’s rather more restrained than ours would be.
‘It’s just learning how to ignore them,’ she told BBC Radio yesterday to show her support for Safer Internet Day. ‘It’s not that easy. When I first saw these tweets, I was hurt by it. But for every negative tweet I get, I get sort of 20 or 30 positive ones.’
Beth also admitted it’s not the only time she’s found herself facing abuse on social media. ‘It can be anything from appearance to "what have I done for my country?"’ she said.
So how does she deal with it? ‘Don’t retaliate, don’t fire back straight away on Twitter or Facebook,’ she advised anyone who’s found themselves in a similar scenario. In Beth’s case she was lucky that her fans rallied around her – and pressured her trolls to accept what they’d done was hurtful.
‘They couldn’t understand what they’d done wrong. But to their credit, when they did, they apologised. They then sent tweets saying: “We didn’t realise how much it could hurt you,”’ she said.
That message of rise above - or, when it gets that bad, block and report them to Twitter – is worth remembering. As is Beth’s advice about what to tweet in the first place: ‘If it’s not something you would want your grandmother to read don’t put it out there.’ Well said. (Mind you, that does probably rule out half of our Twitter statuses).
Follow Fiona on Twitter @nycfiona
Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.