Every year Love Islanders get heavily trolled. From how they act on the show to how they look, there’s always a bunch of viewers that can’t get through an episode without spewing vile hatred towards certain cast members on the show. This year's most prolific victim? Casa Amor's Coco Lodge.
It started when the Casa Amor girls first entered the villa and both Coco and Jazmine Nichol's became targets. What typically starts on Twitter began to escalate on TikTok, with videos made about Jazmine Nichol's use of photo editing on Instagram going particularly viral.
While thoughtful and empathetic conversations about the popular use of photo editing apps are always welcome, that of course doesn’t mean anyone should resort to trolling a 21-year-old for falling foul of them. After all, this is a young woman raised in the Instagram generation, doing what many of her peers also do - shouldn’t we have empathy for those that can’t see how truly beautiful they are without using editing tools? Shouldn’t we be condemning the unrealistic beauty standards that pressure young women into making these choices online instead? Jazmine is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.
Then came the attacks on Coco Lodge, where the tweets and TikToks were frankly too vile to share, with the 27-year-old still a trending topic on Google (much like the search around Ekin-Su Cülcüloğlu, ‘Coco Love Island before surgery’ is her biggest search term). Weeks after the show finished, people are still searching for 'Coco Lodge nose job'. The stunning bombshell has even spoken out about the trolling, telling papers that she now feels her nose job was a 'waste of £10,000' after being so ruthlessly torn apart online.
But why the focus on Coco? She has had no less surgery than other famed Islanders adored by viewers, and she's objectively gorgeous. Could it be the Casa Amor effect? You know, that particularly cruel vitriol that spreads online during the Casa Amor episodes. It appears to occur when viewers grow to love the original Islanders, instinctively disliking anyone that stands in their way of love - all the cheating and lying put us in a foul mood too -, but it’s always the female Casa Amor Islanders that get the worst of the trolling.
And it prevails, as evidenced by the continued searching for 'Coco Lodge before surgery'. After all she's opened up about the impact of trolling, it's evident that #BeKind only extends so far.