I hit the post button on my newest Instagram Reel for the Greenhill Singers Instagram account on Dec. 2, not knowing that it would grow to receive over a million views and thousands of likes and comments.
As the social media manager for Greenhill Choir, I brainstormed lots of different advertising posts to promote our concert on Dec 11. I planned on posting once every school day up until the concert so that I could try to captivate engagement and bring in a bigger crowd.
One of my ideas was a video of members of our choir sing parts of the song “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey, which then prompted the viewers to comment who they thought the soloist was. This is a popular trend across social media, so I thought I would give it a go with our choir.
At first, the video started by getting the same number of views and likes that we normally get from members of our choir and other people within the Greenhill community. But, after some time, non-followers of the account started to like and comment on the video.
The way the Instagram algorithm works is that if your video gets a lot of activity, such as likes and comments, it pushes the video out to more people. Since this video required viewers to comment, it got pushed out to lots of people as a result of the commenting engagement, causing the video to go viral.
I instantly got a high as my video was gaining thousands of likes, comments and views, and the account grossed around 300 new followers. I even uploaded a part two of the video revealing the soloist, which got 8,566 likes and counting.
But then, the hate comments started to come in. Random people all across the world started to make fun of our singing and target certain people.
People, including adults, were commenting hateful things on a post made by teenagers.
As the social media manager, it became my job to track all the hate comments and individually delete them, which got increasingly harder as the comments rolled in at a faster rate.
While there were supportive comments complementing our singing, there were double the amount of hate comments.
Eventually, Greenhill Administrators decided to step in and turn off the comments and then later take the entire post down.
This was hard for me to accept at first because I was happy that my marketing strategies were working well. Although, at the end of the day, we have to protect our students.
This experience left me to reflect on how I barely even comment on videos that come across my feed, but I would never even think about leaving a hate comment, so why do other people? Cyberbullying is a prominent problem among our generation, and it needs to be addressed.
It baffles me that people go out of their way to comment negative things about other people online and do not see a problem with it. Bullying can leave a lasting impact on victims, and cyberbullying is no different.
Before you leave a hate comment or make fun of someone online, think twice about your actions and consider who you may be hurting. Just because you are behind a screen and may face no repercussions, it is never okay.
