Anyone who has spent a substantial amount of time on the internet has run into haters. Haters are people who seem to have no soul. They go around and hate everything they see. Whether it be putting irrelevant lengthy comments on YouTube, just to get their (stupid) views into the world or taking it to a more personal level via cyber bullying.

We may even find ourselves putting mean stuff online. However, internet hate is super preventable. The thing we must remember is that everyone on the internet is a person. We are people hating on people not a username hating a post. Last May I released a video on YouTube that was a book review for the National Library System, I was ecstatic at the amount of people it reached but then I looked at the comments. They were all so mean, some critiquing how close it was to the book, others critiquing my size and how much I looked like their view of the character, others even complained about the book in general. Also, half the comments are in spanish so I pretend those ones are nice but only about 1 out of 5 of the comments were not blatantly rude.
This experience got me thinking, if people knew I was constantly reading the comments, would they be this rude? If they remembered that these were real people not just pixels on a screen would they be a little more kind? There is the popular saying, “Haters gonna hate,” but should we let haters hate? Why are we letting people be so mean to each other because they are online? We don’t stand for bullying in real life and being a hater on the internet is the same as being a bully.