45 Minutes as a Cyberbully

Today I'm going to tell you the story about the 45 minutes I accidentally lived as a cyberbully. I'm honestly still shook. 

The end of the month at work can get pretty stressful, so in order to stay out of my head when I'm off the clock, I usually consume far more media. It's probably an unhealthy coping mechanism but I don't think my free Blogger account comes with the bytes it would take to cover that discussion. 

On Thursday, I was walking home and decided to stop at the grocery store for a few things. While walking, I watched this entertaining Youtube channel that I only discovered last week. A woman in Canada plays Sims and gives them wild personalities and hilarious life stories. You can check her out here, but fair warning, the content is definitely for mature audiences. 

This week, she started a new story line with new characters, including machinima introductions to her gameplay. Machinima is machine cinema or basically videography using computerized characters. It's quite the creative medium. Anyway, in this storyline, one of the characters is very mean. I think the creator was inspired by reality show characters that have no filter and rage issues. 

I'm not a fan of reality shows. They give me legitimate anxiety watching because I'm so worried what they are going to say next. Even if I know it's fake. You know that feeling you get during a scary movie when you just know something is about to jump out at you? That same set of instinctual chemicals your body pumps into your veins during those scenes get inflicted upon me when I see a staged fight about to break out. You don't have to understand it- I sure don't.

However, I enjoyed the video as it was just as entertaining as usual. I decided to write a comment on the video poking fun at myself for stressing about the mean character.

I was in and out of the grocery store quickly and then went back to watching the video on my walk home. As I watched, I went back down the comments section to read other comments. I passed my own and realized, with a shock, that I had replaced the name of the character with the name of the creator!

I basically called the creator a big mean bully that made me feel stressed. With the animated character's name, it was a self-deprecating joke about a made-up person. With the creator's name, it was a passive-aggressive indictment that came out of left-field on a light hearted humor video. Alarmed, I quickly deleted my comment. The time stamp said 6 minutes had passed since I posted it. So likely, no one even saw it, least of all the creator herself. Just in case, I left another comment explaining briefly that if she saw the comment, I switched her name for the character's name by honest mistake (they both are two syllable names that start with a hard "C"!) and I think she's a nice person and hilarious Youtuber. 

At home, I settled in with my shiny new computer and went to quickly check twitter before playing some games myself. 

There, at the top of my timeline, was a tweet from the creator (who I follow) with a screengrab of my comment and the caption "guys, I just don't know..."

Panic. Anxiety. Guilt. This was my worst nightmare.

That may sound dramatic, but it literally is. I have two biggest fears. One, is fairly common and irrelevant to this tale. The other, is that I will become the butt of the joke in a viral meme. That strangers all over the internet will hate me for doing something dumb or someone will make up some awful story and pair it with my picture. That crap happens on the internet. 

Even worse, my first and last name were included. In an attempt to avoid the shelter of anonymity on the internet, all of my accounts are my first and last name. It's too easy to be critical or harsher on the internet when you aren't held accountable for your words. To force myself to combat this, everything I say on the internet can be directly linked back to me. 

It's even more extreme because someday I will (hopefully) undergo the most scrutinous federal background check there is! If that's not enough to hold my tongue when I think of a snarky comment, I don't know what is.

More than the horror that my full name was out there associated with an act of cyberbullying- because that's what it was- I felt really guilty about making her feel bad. 

The screengrab of the comment had the time stamp of four minutes. Those two minutes between her seeing it and my deleting it cost a lot. I made the mistake of reading the replies below. The consensus seems to be that I'm a weirdo, jerk, and jealous of her success. Two of those three might be true, but I take issue with the middle claim.

Now I was in "dear God I have to do something" mode. Obviously, this had to be cleared up somehow. But this woman is quasi-internet famous. There's no guarantee she would see anything I sent her. I would have prefered to do it privately but as of right now, there's no easy way to subtly pull aside a famous Youtuber from Toronto and apologize for accidentally cyberbullying her. 

I decided to go with the most likely way to catch her eye. Own up to it by directly commenting on her tweet. Yes, I could risk the wrath of her followers. And yes, this would also mean that my own followers, who could have stayed oblivious, would get drawn to the screenshot of nastiness. Embarrassing. But, since my first and last name is my twitter handle, I could honestly out myself as the commenter and apologize as face to face as it gets on the internet. 

The minutes ticked by and there was no sign that she saw my response. I decided to hedge my bets. I wrote another comment on the youtube video- which had over 200 comments by then so that was a shout into the void. I sent her a direct message on instagram which was likely filtered to the folder of people she doesn't follow back. Finally, in a desperate act I'm really not proud of, I sent a note to her business email. That's among the internet's biggest protocol no-nos. Those emails are for advertisers and promo requests, not for fans. She may not even be the one who checks it, it could go straight to her representation. But I had to try. 

The anxiety I felt desperately trying to a) undo any hurt feelings caused by my inadvertent cyberbullying and b) clear my name was overwhelming. 

After 45 minutes that felt like an eternity, the creator tweeted back: 

"OH SHIT *4 crying laughing emoticons* that's funny af then my bad *heart emoticon*" and deleted the screengrab of my comment. 

No hard feelings. I replied on another of her tweets expressing my relief that she knows it was an honest mistake, that I enjoy her content, and apologizing for spamming her other social media. 

Ultimately, this harrowing tale comes to nothing. I felt shaky for the rest of the night and most of the next day, to be honest. I'm not sure why it hit me so hard. But I can't help but imagine- what if this had happened to be a famous person with millions of twitter followers rather than thousands? What if they had so much incoming fan attention, they never saw my explanation? Or didn't care to hear it? What if angry fans spammed my twitter, facebook, instagram, etc. with death threats and hateful personal attacks? 

That happens all of the time. 

It's why I have an emergency plan in place. If it ever happens for real, I will immediately deactivate all of my social media accounts and go dark for one year. Without the internet, maybe I'll learn to appreciate the sounds of birds chirping or take the opportunity to enjoy print media's slow march towards death while I still have a chance. 

But I guess for now, thankfully, I'm still on the grid.