As a teenager, I went kind of viral – and the most amazing thing about that is it had absolutely zero effect on my life. It was the summer holidays in 2006, and my friends Jessie, Emma and I decided to film ourselves singing along to our favourite song. We were overheated and hyperactive, jumping up and down and headbanging, stretching our arms to the heavens as we confessed to our mamas that we’d “just killed a maaaaaan” before asking Scaramouche if he’d do the fandango.
Later, I added a couple of captions to the video implying we were drunk, even though I was 14 and the closest I’d been to buzzed was the pure placebo of clutching a glass bottle of J2O. Then – for reasons that are now lost to me – I uploaded the video to YouTube a month later, on 19 September 2006, under the title “Bohemian Crap-sody”.
The comments drizzled in, then came the downpour. “There is a special place for girls like you in hell,” wrote one man. “I now understand why people become serial killers,” offered another. A far more straightforward missive – my personal favourite death threat – simply announced: “They must die!” The video ultimately accumulated 48,526 views. And, sure, OK, I might have stretched the definition of “viral” just then, but it’s worth remembering that in May 2006 the most‑subscribed YouTube channel didn’t even have 3,000 followers. And more than 100 pages of hate comments will never not feel like a lot.
You would think this experience might have left a scar, but I didn’t even mention it in my teenage diary. Five years later, in 2011, an almost-14-year-old named Rebecca Black posted her debut music video, Friday, and went eye-wateringly viral – the song became the most disliked YouTube video that year. Black had to drop out of school due to intense bullying, and the police even got involved after she received death threats. In the following years, the same thing happened to numerous other teenage girls. One California 17-year-old, Lauren Willey, was also unable to return to school after going viral, and later developed an eating disorder that she partly attributes to the hate comments.
Social media changed a lot between my video and these ones, but it has transformed even further since then, to the extent that the UK government wants to ban under-16s from the platforms. People have always hated teenage girls, of course, and there have never not been death threats. But once upon a time, the internet was a place you visited, a place you could leave. No one at school saw my video, and no one could easily screenshot it, download it or send it to each other’s phones, which means I retained the power to erase every last trace. Today, the internet is all around us, all of the time, and many of us feel stuck. It’s no wonder that a Yahoo/YouGov poll discovered this April that more than half of gen Z adults “have avoided expressing themselves freely online for fear of coming across as cringe”.
As a debut children’s author, I’ve spent much of the last few years reconnecting with my younger self. Rereading my teen diaries and rewatching my sort-of-viral video has made me reflect on how adolescent life has altered since I was a teen. When I was young, I was cringe – and I was free. My experiences with “Bohemian Crap-sody” reveal a lot about children’s changing aspirations and limitations, and the way that today’s internet can hold them back. But other traces of younger me online also tell a more complicated story, about the mistakes young people make, and the conflict between being forced to remember and desperately trying to forget.
I don’t know why we filmed our video. I do know that we’d been out playing in the local river, and we’d eaten a truly outrageous amount of fizzy strawberry laces. Perhaps it was the sheer novelty of being able to record anything that inspired us – the webcam might as well have been the printing press for all the change it brought to our lives. And so we positioned ourselves in front of the computer in my family’s mint‑green dining room and we sang Bohemian Rhapsody – at one point so passionately that I hit my head on the ceiling light.
Back then, a funny quirk of YouTube meant that you could reply to videos with another video, thereby linking them together. I set our video as a response to the real Bohemian Rhapsody, which meant that everyone who pressed play on the music video would see our version directly underneath it (that’s how we accumulated so many views). Watching our video back now, I can see that I intermittently shushed my friends or made sure the door was shut properly, clearly embarrassed that my parents or siblings would hear. It’s funny to think that my fear of being perceived somehow didn’t extend to the entire internet.
Because I repeatedly turned the video from public to private over the years, the comments are now totally wiped – but I can still read them via my old inbox, because YouTube used to email you every time someone commented (and from 2008 onwards, the text of the comment was included in the email itself). Hunting through my teen inbox like this makes me feel a bit like an archaeologist, digging for memories.
Shortly after Christmas in 2007, my friend Emma emailed to say that she’d been reading the comments on the video and “they’re mean”. My response was blase, filled with the indestructible ego of youth. “There are, like, five nice ones, though,” I wrote before a smiley face emoji, adding, “And a few people just wanna assault us, s’all good.” Only I didn’t use the word “assault”, and neither did the commenters – there were numerous rape threats.
The reason we angered so many men to the point of threatening us is simply because they were dumb. I titled our video “Bohemian Crap-sody” to reflect the fact that our singing was crap – our cover left a lot to be desired when it came to things such as pitch, harmony and correctly hitting a single note. The commenters, however, interpreted the name as a slight on the song – they thought we were personally insulting Freddie Mercury, and informed us he was “shaking his head in shame in his grave”. While the threats, slurs, and “sluts” and “slags” under the video aren’t remotely funny, looking back at some of the comments now makes me weep with mirth. “U look like the aunts from james and the giant peach,” one person wrote. “Please respectably kill yourselves” still intrigues me deeply. And I adore the exceptionally authored: “Each of you are despicably ugly in your own special way.”
I have no real explanation for why this didn’t bother me at the time, except perhaps that it felt novel, that any attention seemed like good attention at that age, and – as I said – it had zero impact on my real life. I must have understood the video was a little embarrassing before posting it, otherwise why would I have tried to seem cool by pretending we were drunk? But I wasn’t embarrassed enough to hide it away for good until I turned 18. Perhaps I thought that people on the internet were a strange subsection of society, rather than, as is the case now, literally everyone. Or perhaps it’s because the horror stories were yet to come, so I didn’t even realise what could happen when people online got angry. And maybe I clung on to the occasional voice of reason arguing that we were just kids having fun, or as one commenter put it: “THEY ARE A POOR CHILDRENS.”
Or, it could be that the truth is more terrible and less logical, as it often is: I wasn’t just a victim, I was a perpetrator, too. How can I possibly explain that – two months after posting my video – I left my own hate comment on a video of a much younger, more vulnerable girl?
She was small, angelic and singing about her brother – a soldier who was at war. Her video was going viral viral: the real, written-up-in-local-newspapers kind. I recall that my friend and I were sitting at the computer, giddily egging each other on. I want to tell you that we knew our comment would be lost in a sea of thousands of others; that we didn’t think the little girl would ever read it; that we were actually super-smart and disgusted by the cynicism of a parent exploiting their child to make musical military propaganda. In actual fact, we just thought we were funny, and thrilled with the ease by which we could do something bad. The exact cadence of the comment is burned into my brain, and it pops into my head whenever I see that friend again: “Shut up, your brother’s dead.”
Perhaps I remember this so clearly because I worried it would come back to haunt me. It’s almost pointless for me to write this, it’s such a defining fact of our age, but: the things people have posted on the internet have often destroyed their lives. Even telling you this story now, directly, myself – in sentences designed to land with the most impact, to not hide what I did – worries me. I’m taking something that was gone from the internet and ensuring it lives there permanently, on a newspaper’s website, no less. But at least that’s my choice. I’m worried about today’s teens and how their digital histories will affect their lives. Of course, I don’t think they should be freely allowed to be as cruel as I was without repercussions, but I do worry that their mistakes now seem to be eternally etched in stone.
People my age often express gratitude that the social media sites we used as teens have died and taken our Myspace pouts and blingy Bebo selfies with them. Meanwhile, older people seem delighted that they didn’t have to grow up on the internet at all. Again, I believe something more complicated and less logical: like most people, I’ve somehow convinced myself I was young at exactly the right time. Growing up when the internet existed but wasn’t our entire existence was fun and freeing – for good (it allowed us to play with different personae) and for ill (sometimes that persona was “internet troll”). When I see my younger cousins delete all their Instagram pictures and start again, I feel both sad and simultaneously relieved for them. And yet, equally, there’s so much I wish I could delete that’s now out of my hands.
Until a few short years ago, a forum was still home to comments I made about my eating disorder as a teenager in 2008 (the website has since thankfully been deleted). I rediscovered it as a young journalist writing an article about “chew and spitting disorder” – when I searched the relatively underdiscussed topic, my own ancient comments came up. On the thread, other anorexia sufferers and I discussed our experiences of chewing and spitting out food to avoid consuming calories. I lamented that “towards the end of the day i get so hungry i pig out on cereal”. When I gained a few pounds I wrote: “OMG. how do i lose this weight?” Then I came back a few months later having gained more: “im such a huge hideous beast i want to die.”
My eating disorder wasn’t remotely related to “Bohemian Crap-sody”, and ultimately I emerged relatively unscathed from my “viral” video. The same can’t be said for everyone. When she was 17, Lauren Willey, in California, and her friend created a satirical music video called Hot Problems, with the delightfully transgressive lyrics: “Hot girls we have problems too, we’re just like you, except we’re hot.” The video was uploaded in 2012 and went viral almost instantly; it now has nearly 3m views. Commenters assumed the girls weren’t in on the joke, and labelled them tone-deaf (in both senses of the term). Willey was considered a distraction by teaching staff, which is whey she wasn’t allowed to return to school. The video followed her to college, where she developed an eating disorder.
“It was hard as a 17-year-old girl getting thousands and thousands of people commenting on your looks,” says Willey, now a 31-year-old publicist. “People got off on the hate of 17-year-old girls; I think it’s really sad.” Nonetheless, some of the attention was exciting and fun – Willey was invited on to breakfast television and had meetings with reality TV producers – and she says she doesn’t regret the video because it is a good representation of her humour and personality. Still, it had an unexpected, lasting impact on her life. “I did feel like less of a person and more just like a piece of pop culture,” she says. Over the years, she experienced stalking, judgmental colleagues and, to top it all off, ultimately made no money from the song. “There are people that I don’t stand a chance with that already just hate me. Sometimes people will be so mean to me, and then I’m, like, ‘Ohhh, OK, it’s because they know who I am.’”
Today, Willey avoids posting on the internet too much, and she advises young people to protect themselves online. But, like me, she finds it complicated, because she hopes they continue to express themselves, too. “I hope it doesn’t discourage people from being themselves and being goofy, because that’s kind of the spice to life,” Willey says. “If we’re all afraid of being ourselves and being lighthearted and wanting people to laugh, then we’re not going to have joy.”
Now that the distinction between “real life” and “the internet” is completely blurred, I fear that limiting teenagers from expressing themselves online means limiting them full stop. It truly is no mystery why teens today look scared to dance in footage from concerts, clubs and Coachella (so sorry you experienced that, Madonna). I still yearn for the time when the internet was something we turned on and off.
How lucky I was that I could press the power button off the computer and leave the comments on “Bohemian Crap-sody” behind – how equally lucky I am now that I can retrieve those comments and laugh about them to the point of tears. “Just one word fock you” is a favourite, for reasons I don’t have to explain.
I am especially charmed by the person who wrote “Please, die soon!” and followed it up with “(sorry bad English)” – apologetic for the language barrier but not the fact they wished us dead. Even the kind comments are comedic, such as this person who believed there are but two options that face all teens. “It’s just a bunch of happy go lucky kids having fun and enjoying themselves,” they wrote. “It is better than going round the street corners mugging people.” And do you know what? It was!
Some names have been changed.
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