How to deal with haters online

Have you ever received negative comments on social media? Want to know how to deal with haters online? Let’s chat about that today!

This is something I deal with on a daily basis as a content creator on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram. Whether you share content online as a full time job or for fun, you’re going to get negative comments. So how do you deal with that? How do you sort out whether to reply, delete or block? I’m going to share how I deal with this as a content creator of almost 15 years.

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Over the course of the last years, I’ve certainly experienced some negative comments. I’m a highly sensitive person, so I feel things very deeply and tend to take things personally. This career is difficult in that sense for me. In the early years, I’d get a negative comment, immediately get upset, and stew over the comment for hours. Very quickly, I realized I needed a system to deal with this.

You CAN blacklist words on most of the social medias where you type out a list of words that you can filter out of comments. However, there will be comments that can slip under that filter that you’ll see.

There are a few ways that I deal with haters online & negative comments:

The first thing I do, is try to look at a negative comment objectively. Is this constructive criticism? Is there a nugget of truth I could take from this comment? Perhaps there’s a safety issue in my video, or the comment is actually a good idea cloaked in an offensive comment. Sometimes people say something that might be true, but they say it in the nasty way. If the comment falls under this category, my assistant or I will reply with some clarification. I only like to reply one time as sometimes there’s a never-ending back & forth that doesn’t benefit anyone. Usually a simply “thank you for pointing that out” or a quick question reply is sufficient.

Second, if the comment isn’t helpful at all and it’s mildly rude (for example: “This looks UGLY!”), I just leave it up. It’s not really hurtful, but it’s not helpful. It’s OK for people to share their opinion with me even if it’s negative. I’m not sure why people spend the time to leave comments like this, however it can be a great form of engagement and can help my post or video do better on social media. When that person comments, it helps bump that video or photo bump up in the algorithm and do a lot better! I don’t think there’s any reason to reply back to these comments, unless you continue to want to increase the engagement.

Thirdly, there’s a third type of comment I see that truly hurts. For example, “Why are you so fat” or “Your voice is terrible!”. These negative, personal comments are the ones that I think are by people that like attention, are bored, are hurt, or are jealous. Ultimately these types of comments are from people that have their own issues. I don’t reply to these comments, and we try to delete them when we see them. I don’t think there’s any room for comments like these on my social channels. If the person continues to comment negative personal comments on your social channels, block them. I think these types of people want attention, so replying to them will give them what they want.

I feel like the initial hurt these comments cause is unavoidable. But once you practice taking a breath and looking at these comments objectively will help you move past them. Having a partner or assistant help you with comments can also help protect your mental health!

I hope these tips on dealing with haters online helped you today! Let me know what you think in the comments below.