We now live in a digital age. A time where you can have an opinion and share it with hundreds in an instant. We have the made progress in tolerance, but fear is still present on the internet. Now-a-days it seems that if you have anything negative to say about a famous person or group it only takes a matter of seconds before an army of angry fans descend upon you to ruin your day. Now some of you may think that I’m exaggerating and you’d be correct in that assumption. But there is something about the power of fandom in the world of social media.

I decided to conduct an experiment. It was very simple. I created a brand new email and YouTube account. This was done in the case that someone were to look for my personal information they would only find the fake info that I used to create it. I then made my way to a popular YouTube channel and left a “semi-negative” comment. The channel I left the comment on was “DramaAlert” a channel focused on taking YouTube “drama” and reporting on it. Often times, the channel blew stories way out of proportion in order to increase views.

I left what I thought was a valid complaint; here’s my comment “I think he should stop overhyping the argument so much. They’re just two people arguing on the Internet, you don’t need to blow it out of proportion.”

I stepped away from the computer to watch some TV for about two hours. What I returned to was nothing but ridiculous. Apparently some of his fans took issue with my comment and wrote well thought out counter arguments, if you consider a mad ocean of profanity to be well thought out. I received over forty replies, some of which simply said “kill yourself”, others had all number of racial and ethnic slurs, and some had so many curse words I felt like I was in a gas station bathroom. I eventually deleted both the comment and the account just to be safe since a few replies did threaten to find out where I lived. I doubt anything will come about it as this was a few months ago and I have yet to receive any bags of burning dog poo at my front door.

This is just a mild, I repeat, mild, example of the kind of harassment that you can find nowadays on the Internet. It used to be a place where anyone could go and share their opinion, and while there always were people who liked to defend their favorite celebs they did not resort to literal death threats.

We need to learn that it isn’t our responsibility to defend our favorite celebrities and that others are entitled to their own opinions. If we don’t, may God help us if PewDiePie and Kanye West ever get in an argument, because if they do there will be no website on the Internet that will be able to contain the chaos.