To start off with, this isn’t the funny, Jimmy Kimmel-type “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets.” This video will shock and probably anger you, and it should.
Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro are sportswriters who happen to be female. Just because of this mere fact, they receive tons of hateful tweets every day. To prove their point, they selected tweets they’ve received and had nice, decent men read them to their faces. These men probably thought they were in for a funny-mean video, but as you can see, they are not thrilled with what other men said to these women. One even says “I’m having a hard time looking at you as I read this.” About having the actual men who wrote the tweets read them out loud, DiCaro said, “I would have LOVED to have tracked down the guy who ACTUALLY wrote them, so I could look them in the eye while they said that stuff. But alas, most of them use fake names or exist only in egg form.”
DiCaro is the reporter with rape allegations against hockey player Patrick Kane of the Chicago Blackhawks. For this, she saw a growth in the number of hateful, spiteful tweets towards her, including one read off in the video: “I hope you get raped again.”
Spain and DiCaro put together this video for awareness and in the hopes that Twitter may do something to stop the online harassment problem that is an increasingly global issue in today’s online society. They are openly talking about the harassment with the trending hashtag #MoreThanMean.
Now brace yourself. If you’re at work, plug in the headphones, because while they bleep out some of the really bad stuff, there’s still a little NSFW content.
