Politics and drama is everywhere online, but the majority of it is on Twitter.

The is main reason of this, is that the President Of The United States(POTUS) Donald Trump, constantly tweets his personal opinion(with or without the white house’s permission) multiple times every day. Due to the POTUS taking sides on controversial events, and talking about things his representatives recommend him not to send, this causes a massive wave of opinions fighting for or against the President’s views. This is what I like to call a “Political Shit Storm”, as if something happens, if you go on twitter it will be absolutely everywhere. You’ll see tweets of one side, and then the other, neutral parties, memes, and everything inbetween. If you weren’t sick of hearing about these issues in the real life world, you most definitely will be sick of it once you log off of Twitter that day.

Now, you may be wondering “Oscar, there might be politics everywhere, but how does this cause negative effects? Some people love the political side of Twitter!”

And I have to say that I agree with you, many people do enjoy the politics and have a wonderful time debating! However, quite a lot of people don’t enjoy the dark subjects that people always talk about on Twitter. The main reason of why people don’t like twitter is a bit different. It’s a thing called FOMO1, which I’ll explain soon(1)

Let me show you something, today, while writing this, today on the 6th of November, 9:21 am in 2017, I’m going to go onto Twitter, take a screenshot of the front page, and I guarantee at least 1 of the 3 headline in the “Moments” section are negative, and there’s going to be political debates about it.

There we go! Literally all 3 headlines are negative, two of which involve death! That’s absolutely insane!

Even I was expecting a maximum of two negative headlines today, but I am incredibly surprised by how negative some of these are. “20 dead in mass shooting” is sure to spark some more of those gun policy twitter debates, and “Jimmy Fallon’s mother dies” is an incredibly sad event. Even if you don’t care about Jimmy Fallon, news about someone’s mother dying on them, is not a happy subject whatsoever, and having two out of the three headlines be about death is outstandingly dark.

Now there’s more than just arguments on twitter that are making people sad. There’s also a thing called the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO)(2) which is the feeling you get when you see statuses of your friends hanging out somewhere without you. The ones that affect people the most is when a best friend organises an event at a location near you, but doesn’t invite you, or talk about it near you at all. E.g. “Your best friend Jim, is having a party at the local bar with a bunch of mates. This bar is roughly 200m away from your house, within walking distance, and you haven’t been invited, despite him inviting 10 other people to the party.”. Scenarios like this cause the person to worry about their friendship with that specific person, and causes quite a lot of people to get extremely sad.
All of these issues put together cause many people to be leaving twitter, and at one point it got so bad that there were more people leaving twitter than joining it. I’ve attached a (quite poorly shot) image below to show just from searching it, there are many people leaving this site.

You may notice that one of these posts aren’t quite like the other. The last post shown in this image is news about a very famous rapper called CupcakKe was going to leave twitter. The reason why is because she’s been getting death threats sent to her from fans of a band called Beyond The Scene(BTS). You may be thinking what could she have possibly done wrong to get so many death threats? Well, she hit on one of the members from BTS called Junkook through a tweet(warning: quite vulgar)(3). The BTS fans have been calling her a freak, and throwing threats and calling it unnatural for her to hit on someone who is only 20, and even going as far as calling her a pedophile. But here is the thing, CupcakKe is only 20 which contradicts almost all statements thrown against her, since they are literally the same age. I’ll link their birthdays below(4)(5)

There’s another reason why it’s so stupid that they are harassing CupcakKe about this: some of the fans that are hating CupcakKe are saying wayyy worse, sexual things about Junkook. I’d show you what some of the fans are saying about Junkook, but I don’t want this blog to turn 18+ so I’m just gonna say, that a lot of it is much dirtier than what CupcakKe said. (Note: I am not saying what CupcakKe tweeted was an okay thing to tweet, especially since Junkook himself has said he doesn’t like sexual comments about himself online. I’m just pointing out that some the fans who are attacking CupcakKe are being hypocrites as they sometimes post much worse things than CupcakKe did)

If you think about the damage this caused and then amplify it with about 20 different subjects being argued over per day, It’s clear why twitter is seen as a negative space.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this article, or at least have learnt much more about how Twitter can affect people emotionally, and let’s hope that it won’t affect you in this way either.

by Oscar Davis-Hall

References
1. Allan, Vicky. “Why Are People Leaving Social Media in Their Millions? Because Facebook and Twitter Make You Sad.” HeraldScotland, 15 Jan. 2017, http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/15024406.Why_are_people_leaving_social_media_in_their_millions__Because_Facebook_and_Twitter_make_you_sad/.

2. “FOMO: How the Fear of Missing Out Drives Social Media ‘Addiction’.” BBC News, BBC, 1 Mar. 2017, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39129228.

3. MonHOE, Marilyn. “Jungkook Stan Mad I Said Imma Fuck Jungkook .. Lmao … I Said What I Said and I Meant That Shit.” Twitter, Twitter, 3 Nov. 2017, twitter.com/CupcakKe_rapper/status/926260345387343872

4. “Learn about CupcakKe.” Famous Birthdays, http://www.famousbirthdays.com/people/cupcakke.html.

5. “Learn about Jungkook.” Famous Birthdays, http://www.famousbirthdays.com/people/jungkook.html.