Online community manager and social media consultant Laurel Papworth said that, by responding to and retweeting attacks such as calls for her to “go hang herself” – and even calling the boss of a woman who abused her online, Dawson gave her enemies the oxygen they craved.
“You never give bullies oxygen and you never feed the trolls,” Papworth said.
“By simply retweeting every negative tweet that comes along, you’re training your community: to get Charlotte’s attention, be mean to her … I don’t think you should reward trolls with that sort of attention … She got herself into a corner.”
Often, the bully has far fewer followers than their target and, by responding to, or retweeting, their tweets, the victim immediately notifies all of their followers about the attacker’s tweet.
Dawson had just under 35,000 followers at the time of writing, and Papworth said she would have been better served by using Twitter’s “block” tool to stop the attackers from communicating with her. If she did respond, she should have done so without naming the troll Twitter accounts.
I think social media trolls are disgusting, you hear about so many suicides because of things these trolls say. I don’t know how you can monitor it, as everyone posts every minute but I think the best thing to do, is just to ignore them!
Tragic story re Charlotte. My heart goes out to her and pure disgust to her offenders! Shame on them!!! Scary society we live in now. Best advice is to ignore this childish behaviour and not stoop to their level.
Advice is good until it happens to us!! Who knows how we would react in such traumatic circumstances, and, with what Charlotte said, was a reminder of past experience she had endured. How easy is it to cause such suffering when remaining anonymous. Yes, we all hear of this cowardly sick behaviour but this disgraceful event has brought to our attention the results of what powermongers can do to vulnerable people.
May Peaceful blessings embrace you Charlotte as you recover with the support of family and friends..