Trolls tormented me about my mum’s cancer

When Sophie* started blogging, she was overcome by how welcoming the online community was. But when her mother was diagnosed with cancer, she started getting attacked by vicious trolls. She tells The Mix how she got through it.

True Stories

"There’s something about social media that makes it hard to look away"

They say it’s easier to talk to strangers about your problems than people you know. I’d definitely agree with that. Within a year of becoming a blogger it had become my support system. What I didn’t know was that it would also be my worst nightmare during one of the hardest times of my life.

The world of blogging

Blogging was like a drug for me – everyone had such big hearts and a genuine passion for what they wrote about. I felt like I was becoming part of a big, loving family. I became aware of my ‘troll’ as I started to build up my blog following. At first we were friendly, as we were both trying to get started in the blogging world and I watched her profile grow with interest. We even had a few conversations online.

Then a lot of awful stuff happened in my offline world. I was already on antidepressants for anxiety issues, and then my dad got made redundant. But, worse still – my mother found a lump on her breast. The doctors confirmed it was breast cancer. You never believe something like this is going to happen to you, but it did.

Focusing on my family

I knew I needed to focus on my family, so one night I told the blogging community what was going on. I tweeted, telling them about my mother, explaining that, naturally, I wouldn’t be able to write and tweet so much while all this was going on. Most of the responses I got were amazing. People were kind and supportive, offering to help in any way they could – even though they didn’t know me. But then it turned dark…

The next morning I woke up to loads of tweets and emails from people asking me if I was OK. That’s when I found out that this girl I’d never met before had been telling everyone I was lying. I clicked on her timeline and felt utterly sick. She was posting that my mum didn’t have cancer at all. She’d posted nasty pictures and even made a meme about my mother’s cancer. My immediate thought was this person had obviously lost it. But then she seemed to recruit an army of bullies – all of them talking about me, scanning my timeline for tweets, and then ripping the piss out of them the moment I posted. None of these people knew me, and yet they were tearing my world apart at the worst time in my life.

Dealing with the bullying

I didn’t tell my family what was happening – they didn’t need this on their shoulders too. So I kept quiet and dealt with it myself. I just let the bullies continue and hoped they’d get bored.

I stopped tweeting as much. I stopped interacting with people online. I’d just post a link to my blog when a new post was up, and then step away from the computer. But it’s so hard to ignore this sort of thing online. There’s something about social media that makes it hard to look away, even if you know that’s the best thing to do.

Putting an end to it

The nastiness continued, so one day I decided to make a stand. I wrote an open letter to the blogging community, telling people what was going on. The response I got was incredible. Yes, I still received hateful messages, but the best of the internet came out too. Lots of people (some of them famous) posted messages of support at the bottom.

My advice to anyone being targeted by trolls is to be true to yourself and not let them get to you. Sometimes I thought about posting back something like: “I can show you the scar on my mother’s breast, if you really want proof?” But you can’t sink to their level, and you’ll only be giving them what they want. The most important thing for me is that my mother’s cancer has gone – it really doesn’t matter what these bullies think or say.

I still get a nasty comment every now and then, but I’m learning to tune them out – all I see now is a coward hiding behind a keyboard