Among the many things I don’t understand of social media there is the need of people to comment on anything. Why engaging in virtual verbal fights with strangers that will surely misunderstand you? Which pleasure does it give you insulting the author of a post? And, most importantly, where do you find the time to do all that?
I recently published a reel featuring the not-so-sweet encounter between the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and France’s President Emmanuel Macron. This video was played more than 6M times, reaching more than 2M accounts, for a total view time of 9K hours (375 days). It received 70K likes and more than 3K comments.
Now, you would think this is great news, right? Wrong, my phone was constantly buzzing with notifications and I had to read all the idiotic comments, trying to remove the most racist ones. Here a summary of what people have said, just to show how disappointing mankind can be:
- 20% EM is gay / likes older women
- 18% GM is a bloody fascist / Mussolina
- 12% I hate EM / We all hate EM in France
- 8% GM is pretty / I’d do her (and other disturbing variations)
- 7% Racist replies (mostly targeting users that have Arabic surnames)
- 5% I love GM / strong woman / my hero
- 5% Macron has an affair with Trudeau / other conspiracies theories
- 4% Italians are ashamed of GM / she does not represent me
- 4% Some very long copy-and-paste opinion post nobody read
- 3% Free Palestine! (always works)
- 3% She tried Modi she can’t go French anymore / Once you try Indian…
- 3% GM is rude / GM is unfit for her role / GM is not diplomatic
- 3% random bot posting unrelated to the video
- 2% EM is a socialist / EM is left wing
- 1% Who is she?
- 1% Is this supposed to be funny? (always my favorite question)
- 0.9% They are warmongers / I hate them both
- 0.1% “DG MEME is normalizing fascism with this video” (not significant, but particularly dumb)