As a teenager, I went kind of viral \u2013 and the most amazing thing about that is it had absolutely zero effect on my life. It was the summer holidays in 2006, and my friends Jessie, Emma and I decided to film ourselves singing along to our favourite song. We were overheated and hyperactive, jumping up and down\u00a0and headbanging, stretching our arms to the heavens as\u00a0we confessed to our mamas that we\u2019d \u201cjust killed a\u00a0maaaaaan\u201d before asking Scaramouche if he\u2019d do the\u00a0fandango.<\/p>\n
Later, I added a couple of captions to the video implying we were drunk, even though I was 14 and the closest I\u2019d been to buzzed was the pure placebo of clutching a glass bottle of J2O. Then \u2013 for reasons that are now lost to me \u2013 I uploaded the video to YouTube a month later, on 19 September 2006, under the title \u201cBohemian Crap-sody\u201d.<\/p>\n
The comments drizzled in, then came the downpour. \u201cThere is a special place for girls like you in hell,\u201d wrote one man. \u201cI now understand why people become serial killers,\u201d offered another. A far more straightforward missive \u2013 my personal favourite death threat \u2013 simply announced: \u201cThey must die!\u201d The video ultimately accumulated 48,526 views. And, sure, OK, I might have stretched the definition of \u201cviral\u201d just then, but it\u2019s worth remembering that in May 2006 the most\u2011subscribed YouTube channel didn\u2019t even have 3,000 followers<\/a>. And more than 100 pages of hate comments will never not feel like a lot.<\/p>\n Amelia Tait, aged 14, a year after her video went viral. Photograph: courtesy of Amelia Tait<\/p>\n You would think this experience might have left a\u00a0scar, but I didn\u2019t even mention it in my teenage diary. Five years later, in 2011, an almost-14-year-old named Rebecca Black posted her debut music video, Friday, and went eye-wateringly viral \u2013 the song became the most disliked YouTube video that year. Black had to drop out of school due to intense bullying, and the police even got involved after she received death threats. In the following years, the same thing happened to numerous other teenage girls. One California 17-year-old, Lauren\u00a0Willey, was also unable to return to school after going viral, and later developed an eating disorder that she partly attributes to the hate comments.<\/p>\n Social media changed a lot between my video and these ones, but it has transformed even further since then, to the extent that the UK government wants to ban under-16s from the platforms<\/a>. People have always hated teenage girls, of course, and there have never not been death threats. But once upon a time, the internet was a place you visited, a place you could leave. No one at school saw my video, and no one could easily screenshot it, download it or send it to each other\u2019s phones, which means I retained the power to erase every last trace. Today, the internet is all around us, all of the time, and many of us feel stuck. It\u2019s no wonder that a Yahoo\/YouGov poll<\/a> discovered this April that more than half of gen Z adults \u201chave avoided expressing themselves freely online for fear of coming across as cringe\u201d.<\/p>\n As a debut children\u2019s author, I\u2019ve spent much of the last few years reconnecting with my younger self. Rereading my teen diaries<\/a> and rewatching my sort-of-viral video has made me reflect on how adolescent life has altered since I was a teen. When I was young, I was cringe \u2013 and I was free. My experiences with \u201cBohemian Crap-sody\u201d reveal a lot about children\u2019s changing aspirations and limitations, and the way that\u00a0today\u2019s internet can hold them back. But other traces of younger\u00a0me online also tell a more complicated story,\u00a0about the mistakes young people make, and\u00a0the conflict between being forced to remember and desperately trying to forget.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know why we filmed our video. I do know that we\u2019d been out playing in the local river, and we\u2019d eaten a truly outrageous amount of fizzy strawberry laces. Perhaps it was the sheer novelty of being able to record anything that inspired us \u2013 the webcam might as\u00a0well have been the printing press for all the change\u00a0it\u00a0brought to our lives. And so we positioned ourselves in front of the computer in my family\u2019s mint\u2011green dining\u00a0room and we sang Bohemian Rhapsody \u2013 at one point so passionately that I hit my head on the\u00a0ceiling light.<\/p>\n Back then, a funny quirk of YouTube meant that you could reply to videos with another video, thereby linking them together. I set our video as a response to the real Bohemian Rhapsody, which meant that everyone who pressed play on the music video would see our version directly underneath it (that\u2019s how we accumulated so many views). Watching our video back now, I can see that I intermittently shushed my friends or made sure the door was shut properly, clearly embarrassed that my parents or siblings would hear. It\u2019s\u00a0funny to think that my fear of being perceived somehow didn\u2019t extend to the entire internet.<\/p>\n Because I repeatedly turned the video from public to private over the years, the comments are now totally wiped \u2013 but I can still read them via my old inbox, because YouTube used to email you every time someone commented (and from 2008 onwards, the text of the comment was included in the email itself). Hunting through my teen inbox like this makes me feel a bit like an archaeologist, digging for memories.<\/p>\n Shortly after Christmas in 2007, my friend Emma emailed to say that she\u2019d been reading the comments on the video and \u201cthey\u2019re mean\u201d. My response was blase, filled with the indestructible ego of youth. \u201cThere are, like, five nice ones, though,\u201d I wrote before a smiley face emoji, adding, \u201cAnd a few people just wanna assault us, s\u2019all good.\u201d Only I didn\u2019t use the word \u201cassault\u201d, and neither did the commenters \u2013 there were numerous rape threats.<\/p>\n The reason we angered so many men to the point of threatening us is simply because they were dumb. I\u00a0titled our video \u201cBohemian Crap-sody\u201d to reflect the fact that our singing was crap \u2013 our cover left a\u00a0lot to be desired when it came to things such as pitch, harmony and correctly hitting a single note. The commenters, however, interpreted the name as a\u00a0slight on the song \u2013 they thought we were personally insulting Freddie\u00a0Mercury, and informed us he was \u201cshaking his head in shame in his grave\u201d. While the threats, slurs,\u00a0and\u00a0\u201csluts\u201d and \u201cslags\u201d under the video aren\u2019t remotely funny, looking back at some of the comments\u00a0now makes me weep with mirth. \u201cU look like the aunts from james and the giant peach,\u201d one person wrote. \u201cPlease respectably kill yourselves\u201d still intrigues me deeply. And I adore the exceptionally authored: \u201cEach of you are despicably ugly in your own\u00a0special way.\u201d<\/p>\n Some of the comments sent to Tait in response to \u2018Bohemian Crap-sody\u2019. Composite: Guardian Design<\/p>\n I have no real explanation for why this didn\u2019t bother me at the time, except perhaps that it felt novel, that any attention seemed like good attention at that age, and \u2013 as I said \u2013 it had zero impact on my real life. I must have understood the video was a little embarrassing before posting it, otherwise why would I have tried to seem cool by pretending we were drunk? But I\u00a0wasn\u2019t embarrassed enough to hide it away for good until I\u00a0turned 18. Perhaps I thought that people on the internet were a strange subsection of society, rather than, as is the case now, literally everyone. Or\u00a0perhaps it\u2019s because the horror stories were yet to come, so\u00a0I\u00a0didn\u2019t even realise what could happen when people online got angry. And maybe\u00a0I clung on to the occasional voice of reason arguing that we were just kids having fun, or as one commenter put it: \u201cTHEY ARE A POOR CHILDRENS.\u201d<\/p>\n Or, it could be that the truth is more terrible and less logical, as it often is: I wasn\u2019t just a victim, I was a perpetrator, too. How can I possibly explain that \u2013 two months after posting my video \u2013 I left my own hate comment on a video of a much younger, more vulnerable girl?<\/p>\n She was small, angelic and singing about her brother \u2013 a soldier who was at war. Her video was going viral viral: the real, written-up-in-local-newspapers kind. I\u00a0recall that my friend and I were sitting at the computer, giddily egging each other on. I want to tell you that we knew our comment would be lost in a sea of thousands of others; that we didn\u2019t think the little girl would ever read it; that we were actually super-smart and disgusted by the cynicism of a parent exploiting their child to make musical military propaganda. In actual fact, we just thought we were funny, and thrilled with the ease by which we could do something bad. The exact cadence of the comment is burned into my brain, and it pops into my head whenever I see that friend again: \u201cShut\u00a0up, your brother\u2019s dead.\u201d<\/p>\n double quotation markWhen I see my younger cousins delete all their Instagram pictures and start again, I\u00a0feel\u00a0both sad and simultaneously relieved for them<\/p>\n Perhaps I remember this so clearly because I worried it would come back to haunt me. It\u2019s almost pointless for me to write this, it\u2019s such a defining fact of our age, but: the things people have posted on the internet have often destroyed their lives. Even telling you this story now, directly, myself \u2013 in sentences designed to land with the most impact, to not hide what I did \u2013 worries me. I\u2019m taking something that was gone from the internet and ensuring it lives there permanently, on a newspaper\u2019s website, no less. But at least that\u2019s my choice. I\u2019m worried about today\u2019s teens and how their digital histories will affect their lives. Of course, I don\u2019t think they should be freely allowed to be as cruel as I\u00a0was without repercussions, but I do worry that their mistakes now seem to be eternally etched in stone.<\/p>\n People my age often express gratitude that the social media sites we used as teens have died and taken our Myspace pouts and blingy Bebo selfies with them. Meanwhile, older people seem delighted that they didn\u2019t have to grow up on the internet at all. Again, I\u00a0believe something more complicated and less logical:\u00a0like most people, I\u2019ve somehow convinced myself I was young at exactly the right time. Growing up when the internet existed but wasn\u2019t our entire existence was fun and freeing \u2013 for good (it allowed us to play with different personae) and for ill (sometimes that persona was \u201cinternet troll\u201d). When I see my younger cousins delete all their Instagram pictures and start again, I\u00a0feel\u00a0both sad and simultaneously relieved for them. And yet, equally, there\u2019s so much I wish I could delete that\u2019s now out of my hands.<\/p>\n Until a few short years ago, a forum was still home to comments I made about my eating disorder as a\u00a0teenager in 2008 (the website has since thankfully been deleted). I rediscovered it as a young journalist writing an article about \u201cchew and spitting disorder\u201d \u2013 when I searched the relatively underdiscussed topic, my own ancient comments came up. On the thread, other anorexia sufferers and I discussed our experiences of chewing and spitting out food to avoid consuming calories. I lamented that \u201ctowards the end of the day i\u00a0get so hungry i pig out on cereal\u201d. When I gained a few pounds I wrote: \u201cOMG. how do i lose this weight?\u201d Then I came back a few months later having gained more: \u201cim\u00a0such a huge hideous beast i want to die.\u201d<\/p>\n double quotation markIt was hard as a 17-year-old girl getting thousands and thousands of people commenting on your looksLauren Willey (on the left) and her friend Drew, both aged 17, around the time \u2018Hot Problems\u2019 was made. Photograph: courtesy of Lauren Willey<\/p>\n