#FRONTROW: Here’s how I deal with hate on social media

“How do you deal with all the hate?” people often ask me. “I drink like a fish and cry myself to sleep” seems like the realistic answer they expect, but that’s simply not the case. I don’t waste my admittedly limited, and therefore precious, brain activity on the opinions of random people on the Internet.

It’s not just a coping mechanism, it’s a simple philosophy I have developed over the last decade to explain the army of trolls in cyberspace. When I started out on the idiot box barely out of my teens, I had modest expectations of a conventionally acceptable level of success and not much else.

What I didn’t sign up for was having to explain my life to strangers on the Internet for the rest of my life.

“If you live for people’s acceptance, you’ll die from their rejection,” Grammy winning hip hop star Lecrae’s book, Unashamed, admonishes.

I didn’t know that at 20, obviously, but it is a painful lesson I have learnt in the time since. It baffled me that even after I had overcome crippling self-doubt just to claim my place in the world, I ended up in a career with a deluge of disapproval. I dropped out of journalism school for a long time but even if I had graduated before I started reading aloud on the news, nothing would have prepared me for the coming of age of cyberbullying.

NOT SEEKING VALIDATION FROM RANDOM PEOPLE

First, it was about how I said my name, then how I looked, what I wore, what I said, the colour of the sky and the unnecessary letters in the word queue.

Even when I was making major strides professionally, there has never been a shortage of people telling me how much of a failure I am. When I was mixing with presidents and prime ministers, Nobel laureates, global business leaders and award-winning artists at the top of their game, there were naysayers telling me I was nothing. Asking important questions, holding public officials accountable and trying to untangle the issues that divide us, talkers have always dismissed all of it as worthless. I could walk on water in a true. modern-day miracle and people would still say it is because I can’t swim, which I can’t, but that’s not the point. You can’t please everyone in this line of work and you shouldn’t even bother.

I am not seeking validation from random people on the Internet. There is no amount of hate on my Facebook page that will make me change how I live my life. You can call me every colourful name under the sun on Twitter but none of them will force me conform to what you want me to do.

Write every insult possible on my Instagram page and I will still proceed on my own terms. Social media hate no longer has any impact on me like the old adage: sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never break me. Never underestimate people’s capacity for malice, I tell friends who come into contact with the online mobs. Strangers who have never met you but are happy to aggressively attack you for no reason at all do not deserve your attention, not even an acknowledgment.

I have been judged constantly for the last decade and found unworthy every time but I couldn’t care less. It hurt in the beginning because people who didn’t know me were saying horrible things about me. I was just a kid trying to make my way in the word and I didn’t know that human beings can be cruel to others just to feel better about themselves. It was brutal, but it taught me that I didn’t need permission from anyone to be myself. To know me is to love me and those close enough already know that. I’m doing this life on my own terms because I’m not trying to be like anyone else. I don’t want to live according to your standards, your timelines for what I should do at what age, and certainly not your demands for how I should do my job.

People will tell you how you’re nothing and you don’t deserve anything you’ve worked hard for. Ignore them. They will try to shame you and criticise you into apologising for living your best life now. Disregard them. Underachievers will project their fears or shortcomings on you, jealous people will try to diminish your accomplishments so they don’t have to confront their own failures, bigots will try to beat you down with their prejudice so you agree with them and zealots will ram their beliefs down your throat. I have an Audience of One - God. He is the only one I’m trying to please. I don’t judge my progress based on what the crowd is saying. Whether they’re praising me or railing against me, I’m running my own race at my own pace. Like a man standing still in the middle of manic Times Square, I have found myself in the middle of the noise. That is how I deal with the hate.

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HUGH HEFNER’S COMPLICATED LEGACY

Hugh Marston Hefner, the founder of the magazine that preceded Internet pornography by several generations, died last week at the age of 91. The founder of Playboy lived an enviable life for many men, surrounded by a bevy of beauties in a mansion, even though their exact relationship with him was much too complicated to describe in a few words.

“In my wildest dreams, I could never have imagined a sweeter life,” he once said and everyone groaned in envy.

“He might have given money to some anti-racism causes, but the man was rape culture’s mascot,” writer Luvvie Ajayi wrote. “Legacies are complicated for sure, but let’s not erase someone’s bad deeds because they wrote some checks.” Under that Facebook update, a user named Sarah S Nester had an even better description: “He was a pimp with savvy marketing and a knowledge of publishing with a little bit of class for the finer things. If he were a regular pimp in a plaid suit, he’d be seen as the pervert he is.”
In the early days, before people stopped reading magazines, Playboy featured lots of naked women and surprisingly good interviews with celebrities. He turned that into a multimedia empire but his legacy is much more nuanced and not everyone loved what he became.

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BOINNET’S REFUSAL TO APOLOGISE BAFFLING

I watched inspector General of Police Joseph Boinnet engage my boss, Linus Kaikai, with growing bewilderment. On the question of whether police used excessive force on University of Nairobi students, a first year public relations student could tell you what the obvious response is. “I would like to personally apologise to any UoN students who were harassed and assaulted by our officers,” he should have said.

“The matter is still under investigation but if any of them is found guilty, we will take action against them according to our guidelines. Those actions do not represent those of the philosophy nor the beliefs of the police service and I condemn them fully.”

Casting doubt on the veracity of the video of obvious police brutality was to be expected, but refusing to take responsibility for an obvious breach of ethics and evident poor judgement is just perplexing. How can we trust him if he doesn’t even trust us?

Send your comments to Larry Madowo at [email protected]