Ben Ellington looks at the dumpster fire that is EIHL Twitter and fears it will only get worse.
The warm afterglow from a magnificent victory on Sunday didn’t last long, did it? If you’re wondering what I am talking about, you are probably one of the lucky ones that don’t have a Twitter account and haven’t been subject some, quite frankly, unbelievable nonsense on the platform over the past couple of days.
Before I explain, I’d better make something clear. I don’t really ‘do’ or get social media. I have a Twitter account that I use for keeping up with hockey news but apart from that, nothing, no Facebook, no Instagram and as far as I’m concerned, Tik Tok is the sound an analogue clock makes! That may seem strange to most, especially as I am in my early thirties, but having seen the hold social media has on friends, family and colleagues I’ve decided to avoid it as much as I can, apart from using Twitter as a hockey news conduit. Unfortunately, Twitter has the ‘For You’ tab and that’s where I have found some quite disturbing content around EIHL Twitter.
In order to prevent a pile on and because I don’t want to publicise any of the messages, I won’t go into exact specifics of who has written the tweets, but this has stemmed from some people (rightly in my opinion) taking offence to what was written. Essentially some people were making jokes that if certain players left their clubs, they would commit suicide. While I’m pretty sure the authors of said Tweets meant what they said in jest, there are certain things you should not joke about. The sport in this country has gone through more than its fair share of tragedy in recent times and to ‘joke’ about suicide is in pretty poor taste at best, a taboo subject in regards to EIHL hockey if ever there was one.
When said authors of these Tweets were challenged, they doubled-down, claiming that as they were sufferers of depression and had suicidal thoughts themselves, they had every right to ‘joke’ about it. When further challenged on this they claimed they were being bullied and a pile-on was taking place.
I see two issues coming from this. First, no-one seems to take responsibility for their actions and when they are challenged claim to be victims. I believe the phrase is ‘own your s**t’. Second, it shows all too well the toxicity of social media, especially Twitter. While I think challenging these opinions was absolutely right, some of it went too far and went from challenging opinions to verbal abuse. Would I like to see more respect between fans on Twitter? Of course, but I can only see the problem getting worse. We are close to having an entire generation who have been brought up with social media. They have their eyes glued to a phone several hours a day and attention spans last around 30 seconds. The genie is out of the bottle and I don’t think we can get it back in.
The saddest thing for me is just days after one of the greatest finals of all-time and a first Panthers trophy for many years, we are drawn into the negatives instead of revelling in the joy of Sunday. I read Paul Balm’s article on here a couple of days ago and it conveyed so many good things about the weekend. Sadly, that is mostly forgotten as yet another verbal war erupts on Twitter between fans of EIHL clubs.
Is it too much to ask for people to think about what they post or is this sort of thing about to become more commonplace? Sadly I fear the latter.
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