One of my close friend on twitter decided to quit the platform because she tweeted something against a famous celebrity and army of trolls attacked her. They started with abuses, then they started giving threats, and some of these trolls found her facebook and names of her parents and started abusing them too. She was scared. She went into depression. She deleted all her social media profiles and switched off her phone. She decided not to come back ever on social media. 

If social media trolling affects you this deep, Read further:

Today, Social Media trolling and abuses is one of the major reason why youth feel depressed after using social media. They try their best to be as positive but attacks by troll army breach their mental peace. But, to be honest, this is not the solution one should apply for regaining that mental peace because living life today without social media is not advisable. Your social presence (your profiles on instagram, twitter, facebook ,etc) is somewhat similar to the Uber driver’s rating which you check before boarding the cab. If your social presence is dull or very vile, you will find it difficult to get a new job or business because people and HRs keep an eye on your social accounts all the time. And for the same reason, abusing back to these troll army is like fighting someone in the dirt.

Question arise – What to do then? How to be at peace? I want to use social media but these people never let me use it in peace.

Follow these steps:

1. Understand the negativity of trolls and from where they are coming from: Most of the time these trolls are paid. There are my IT cells running for every celeb, every political party and they are paid to abuse you. The payment ranges from 2INR per tweet to 100 INR. This is in fact giving major employment to people who got zero skills but knows how to make an account on social media and throw abuses on people with an identity. And who doesn’t want to make such easy money? Especially when you just have to sit and type abuses. Now, when you know that most of these abuses are paid, it should not affect you that much. And if you haven’t tasted it yet, go comment something full of criticism on any celeb’s instagram or twitter post, you will understand what negative trolling is.
2. Internet world is NOT everything: Contradictory statement coming from my side but here I mean to say, Internet world shouldn’t be considered a ‘world’ if it is causing you depression or affecting your mental health. For me it is a world. I eat sleep rave repeat on internet because I understand the concept of negativity here and I don’t let it affect my peace.
3. It is all about Validation and Attention: We as human being crave attention and validation from other people all the time. Constant validation (in form of RTs and Likes) spikes our dopamine which makes us feel good and for same reason these people troll you. They get thousands of likes and RTs on their trolling tweet or comment. And it makes them feel good about themselves as in real life they have very less stuff going on around which could give them similar feeling.
4. The Market of Negativity Vs Positive: If you think it as market, positivity market share is way too less compared to negativity market. Reason being, people love being negative and in dwelling. You want to try this? Post a piece of content (tweet or story) about broken heart or life being unfair or similar bs, and Post a piece of some motivational quote or speech, people would relate to negative content more. It depends on you which market you select for the betterment of your own mental health.
5. Social Media is Game: https://medium.com/@chiragbarjati/social-media-is-a-game-5b80e3bf1c15

These pointers should reverse engineer you about social media. If not, You can always DM me on Instagram or Twitter for Positivity, Motivation and Real talks.