Coping with Online Hate

A few hours after making a post on Facebook, the negative comments and “laugh” reacts start rolling in. Each of FORGE’s posts gets negative attention. When posting videos on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, especially videos that include the faces of FORGE staff, the comments become even more targeted and personal. Unfortunately, this has become a common experience for anyone who is openly queer or trans online, or shares content about trans/nonbinary topics. As an organization, we remove all hate comments as quickly as possible so that our community does not have to see them while looking for support and connection.

Hate comments wear on our mental health. While we can brush a few off, deleting a flood of hundreds of hate comments is draining. How do we handle this when it becomes a part of our daily life online?

On their personal accounts, some people “clap back” against hate comments to spread awareness and start conversations. This can drive engagement, and might bring in more of the intended audience, but it also might bring in more of the same hateful messages.

This is also something to consider when using your personal page. Who is your audience? Does engaging with hate comments bring them more attention and visibility? Maybe it feels empowering to shut down misinformation and counter hateful messages with positive ones–Nonbinary activist and author Jeffery Marsh does this on their social media accounts regularly.

How does it feel for you when seeing or interacting with these comments?

On a personal level, the kinds of hateful, often violent comments we receive make me angry. And I instinctively want to say something snarky and self-protective, to make the troll feel like the butt of a joke rather than the one with the power. I have done this in the past on personal pages. But do I feel any better afterward?

No. Those comments often stick with me, lingering, and I think about them and my responses over and over. Engaging makes them feel even more potent.

We all cope with hate comments in different ways. There are lots of strategies I’ll share that we can use that limit our exposure to hateful messages, but we may not be able to avoid seeing them entirely. Sometimes this means paying attention to the impact they have on us after spending a long time on social media, and taking extra care of ourselves to counter those impacts.

So what can we do to cope with receiving hateful comments and messages?

First, know that it isn’t actually about you. Hate comments can be incredibly personal and targeted, and some community members have even experienced doxxing or swatting as a result of continual online harassment. But while these comments may be attacking you personally, they reflect that commenter’s deep unhappiness and fear. They do not mean anything about you.

It’s difficult to empathize with someone calling for violence against our communities, and I don’t think we have to. It gives me some comfort to know that in order to say such awful things about another person, you have to be deeply unhappy with yourself, whether or not you are aware of it. Hate comments often echo the same phrases or jokes over and over. Sometimes they try to engage us in bad faith arguments that keep us hooked in instead of focusing on conversations that actually fulfill us.

They’re un-creative, a way for someone to lash out from a place of hate and fear. They don’t do anything to benefit the people who leave them, since they’ll inevitably be fed more content they dislike due to algorithms showing us more of what we interact with. They hurt everyone involved, and this hurt is amplified for queer and trans folks and folks with any marginalized identities.

Some tips:

Find connection offline. Friends, family, hobbies, pets, anything that gets us unplugged.

We also know this is tricky, since much of our community connection with other trans folks may happen online. This is especially true when we’re a part of even smaller circles, like covid-cautious groups or communities of trauma survivors that don’t have a large in-person presence.

Report and block (and document) hate when you see it. Unfortunately, hate comments are popping up on all kinds of social media posts. Sometimes I’ll be watching videos on Instagram and open the comments section of something completely unrelated to trans communities, and encounter anti-trans hate. We shouldn’t have to see this on our feeds.

One action we can take to help reduce the amounts of anti-trans hate online is to report the comments (and potentially blocking the commenter, too). While not all reports will be acted upon, individual instances of hate may be removed from other people’s posts, or your own.

If you see a comment that seems especially threatening (ex: someone making a violent threat), especially if you or someone you know is the target of the hate, you may want to take a screenshot to document the threat in case it escalates further. It’s likely a good idea to do this before reporting a comment or blocking the poster, since the comment may disappear afterward.

Adjust privacy and comment settings. Social media may be a place for us to connect with people outside of our immediate circles. At the same time, limiting who can see your account and interact with your posts may help to reduce hate. Making your account private, so you can either approve or disapprove new followers, limits who can see your posts. On Facebook, you can choose to make posts public, or visible to “friends only.”

As an alternative to making your account private, you might also choose to limit the comments that appear on your posts. This is particularly helpful for folks (or organizations) with larger platforms who often interact with people not on your followers list.

Not all platforms are created equal when it comes to hiding harmful comments. Some, like TikTok, will allow you to filter all comments so that you have to approve comments before they appear. Others, like Facebook, only allow you to turn off comments if a post is not sponsored.

Some platforms also allow you to filter for specific keywords to prevent them from appearing. We use this feature to hide commonly-used transphobic phrases on Facebook, but we’re always having to adapt as anti-trans dog whistles evolve. It may not always be obvious what innocuous messages are hateful until someone points it out to us.

Turning off comments completely isn’t always a great solution, since it limits the conversations we can have with other folks in our communities. We deserve to have that space to connect without fear of hateful trolling. But turning off comments, or using comment filtering, even temporarily, can give us a much-needed break to take care of ourselves rather than managing hate comments. This might also be a good time to connect with others one-on-one.

Know that you don’t have to be constantly “on.” Receiving hateful, even threatening messages, can feel pressing and urgent. We might wonder if they will escalate, if others will see them and be harmed, or just feel like we need to defend ourselves when we’re attacked on public platforms. But your wellbeing is more important. You can always log off and come back later, and document any comments you might be particularly concerned about.

In conclusion:

Social media should be a place for us to connect with our communities. Having a public profile does not mean that you deserve to receive abuse online. Unfortunately, hate comments and trolling are on the rise, and not all platforms offer tools for removing or limiting these interactions. You still have options. Remember that your mental health and wellbeing are more important than responding to bad faith commenters. You don’t have to deal with online hate alone.