Harassment at its Finest.

Social media is incredible. We can now interact with people all across the world with little to no wait time! We don't even need the address of the person we want to talk to, just the username or some piece of it. In fact, you don't even need to know the person you are talking to! It used to be that the only way you were going to meet strangers would be if you walked out of your house and started talking to the new faces you saw on the street.

For those of you who love the inside of your house as much as I do, you know how daunting a task that can seem. Yet, interacting with new people on the web is almost required, at least in regards to social media. Strangers follow your accounts, comment on your posts, like your pictures, and in order to thrive on social media, you need strangers!

And of course, you follow, comment, and like the content of strangers as well! On occasion, those strangers happen to be famous. If a celebrity wants to stay relevant to the public, then they practically need an account on every platform of social media, and there are many different platforms. The up-side to celebrities using social media is how human it makes them feel. It used to be that the only thing people saw about the rich and famous were pictures of them walking down the red carpet, or highly staged outings. Yet, ever since one brave (or invasive) magazine began their article Stars, They're Just Like us!, people started craving proof that famous people were just as average as the rest of us. 

Now, we get behind the scenes looks into their lives nearly everyday! And we can like, comment, and share all of their content, all in the hopes that they will take notice of one of the thousands of nameless URLs following them on the web. For the most part, it's common to see praise left in the comments, or fan art tagged so the celebrity can find it. And yet, sadly, there are those horrible comments left by disgruntled fans or people with strong opinions and little common decency that tear down the owner of the account. 

I took a personal interest in this side of social media one day when I was scanning the twitter account of one of the members of the popular boyband, One Direction. They had tweeted about something very innocuous, and then in came the flood of replies, both relevant and irrelevant. I was scrolling down when one of the replies caught my eye, and not at all in a good way.

 The tweet itself was sent out by a fifteen year old girl! It's both disturbing and rude, and the farther down I scrolled, the more I began to notice these kinds of replies.

It almost seemed like these people were posting without the knowledge that people could see what they write. We've all been warned over and over again that what we put on the web stays on the web and follows us through life. Yet these people were posting things both cruel and crude without forethought! Not only will this affect them, but despite being a stranger on the web, it's still hurtful to the person on the receiving end.

While social media has connected people in a good way, its also increased the ways in which a person can be harassed and insulted, especially celebrities. No longer does a person have to wait for hours for someone famous to leave their hotel room in order to yell "I hate you!" Instead, they can simply log on to any site and write on the person's page any negative thing they have to say.