As someone who is starting, and interested in content creation, our contemporary period makes it a little bit harder with the existence of hate comments and online harassment. Especially in the last few years the emergence of cancel culture and the lack of media literacy makes this an even harder topic.
Thankfully, my small blog for a class does not receive hate comments or anything, but if I do want to pursue content creation, I should learn and talk about it.
“The Psychology of Online Comments” by Maria Konnikova talks in depth about online comments. My favourite study that is highlighted in the article is, “When people don’t think they are going to be held immediately accountable for their words they are more likely to fall back on mental shortcuts in their thinking and writing, processing information less thoroughly. They become, as a result, more likely to resort to simplistic evaluations of complicated issues” (Konnikova, 2013).
This brings up a point I have been trying to make for a long time, the lack of nuance, understanding, and most importantly media literacy, when it comes to these anonymous hate comments. For example, most hateful comments I see on TikTok are from someone who didn’t understand the video correctly, and instead of taking the time to understand, they just leave a hate comment instead.
As well as hate comments about political issues or other complicated issues, which the hate commentators have no education about these issues.
