A video of men reading mean tweets sent to female sports writers was posted yesterday. This has created a large discussion on Twitter because some of the tweets were so disgusting. There has been a conversation under #MoreThanMean. Most of the responses are supporting the women and discussing how important it is for men and internet commenters in general to consider their words before typing them. The general theme of the conversation is that the tweets are hard to hear but the fact that they are consistently aimed at female sports writers is disgusting. There are opposing views however that say that there are bigger problems in the world and people need to just ignore the trolls. Some tweets suggest that it’s not just women receiving this type of abuse and the two women in the video need to ignore the comments. Below is the video and some of the tweets discussing it.
Try watching that entire video and not feeling uncomfortable. It's impossible. This type of disturbing behavior needs to stop. #MoreThanMean
— Trevor Phibbs (@trevorphibbs) April 26, 2016
The guy who has been trolling me all day every day for 9 months doesn't believe the #MoreThanMean video is accurate. Oh, the irony.
— Julie DiCaro (@JulieDiCaro) April 26, 2016
We're dealing with ACTUAL violence against minorities as well as terrorism. "Mean TWEETS" are the LEAST of my concerns. #MoreThanMean
— Brenden Dilley (@Hublife) April 26, 2016
@JeffDarlington @jemelehill @SarahSpain @JulieDiCaro they're just jokes I think. No need to get all worked up over words
— 'nard smiff (@Denard_Smith7) April 26, 2016
People have the mindset that being nice is hard. It's not. It just takes practice and that's the fun part.#BeKind #MoreThanMean
— Justin VanLaere ▶ (@storminspank) April 26, 2016
Thanks for posting! I saw this trend but hadn’t really gotten a chance to fully read up on it yet. I think this issue totally deserves more attention and couldn’t disagree more with those who say it’s not important. Too many people say disgusting, degrading things online because the nature of the internet allows them to without any real consequence. If we call more attention to it, maybe they’ll learn that they could instead be the ones called out for their behavior.
Thank you so much for sharing this. it’s absolutely horrible what females in the sports industry deal with and more people need to be aware of this!
This is a very important and well done analysis of the #MoreThanMean hashtag. I don’t follow many sports related accounts of twitter, so I was not aware of this current conversation on Twitter. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. You picked a really strong collection of tweets to illustrate the wide spectrum of opinions surrounding #MoreThanMean. The video set the stage really well for your analysis. Overall your blog post has definitely motivated me to want to chime in to the conversation in support of women like Julie DiCaro.
Thanks for looking at this! I haven’t really heard much about the hashtag but it’s incredible how many people say “it’s just a joke” or “people are overreacting” even though it’s not – it’s scary and it’s real. I’m glad you posted the video because I hadn’t watched it yet, even though I’ve seen it around the web before.
I’m so glad you posted this! I wasn’t aware of this campaign and I’m happy you chose it because it deserves attention. It’s unreal that people could actually undermine the effects of this horrible rhetoric. You would think this hashtag wouldn’t have many opposing viewpoints, but unfortunately, it does.