GABBY Douglas, a gold medal-winning gymnast, seemed confused when a reporter at the Olympics started asking her questions about the internet just after her final routine at Rio. The reporter wanted Douglas to answer for a wave of petty criticism, much of it online, targeting Douglas’ hair, facial expressions and hand gestures during the Games. She started to tear up as she gave her response. “I tried to stay off the internet,” she said.

“It was hurtful. It was hurtful. It was. It’s been kind of a lot to deal with,” she said.

Douglas is just one of many high-profile individuals who have avoided or quit social media — particularly Twitter — recently, often because of waves of abuse, prompted by the “wrong” hair, by appearing in the Ghostbusters reboot or by supporting the wrong romantic pairing of two characters in a fictional television show.

Below, we’ve rounded up some of these cases just from the past month:

Leslie Jones

The Ghostbusters actress temporarily left Twitter days after the release of her movie, following a particularly intense wave of racist abuse.

As Jones tweeted image after image of the hateful things people were sending her way, Twitter came under increasing pressure, as it has in the past, to do something about it. Although Twitter’s rules ban “harassment” and “hateful conduct”, the social media company has long been criticised for its slow, inconsistent enforcement of its own policies.

Eventually Twitter did respond, deleting several of the worst tweets Jones received and permanently banning some accounts. Among those banned was Milo Yiannopoulos, a Breitbart writer who often used his once-popular Twitter account to mock his ideological enemies.

As the harassment against Jones intensified, Yiannopoulos wrote several tweets making fun of Jones’ response to the abuse, calling her “barely literate” and sharing doctored images with his 300,000 followers that made it appear (falsely) as if Jones were making profane and offensive postings. Yiannopoulos later disputed his suspension, calling it “cowardly.”

Twitter took the unusual step of releasing a statement that addressed the abuse Jones faced, promising changes to Twitter’s hateful conduct policy and its abuse reporting system “in the coming weeks.” Those changes have not yet been announced, but Twitter said last week that it “will have updates to share soon.”

Meanwhile, Jones has returned to Twitter. And her tweets about the Olympics were so successful that NBC (a company for which Jones also works) ended up flying her to Rio so that she could live tweet the Games in person.

Normani Kordei

The Fifth Harmony singer announced that she was “taking a break” from Twitter in early August, for depressing and familiar reasons: “Over the course of this last week and especially over the last 48 hours, I’ve not just been cyber bullied, I’ve been racially cyber bullied with tweets and pictures so horrific and racially charged that I can’t subject myself any longer to the hate.”

“I’m not the first black female celebrity to deal with this and I’m sure I won’t be the last,” she wrote, before thanking Twitter for “immediately jumping into action”.

According to the Cut, the bullying began after Kordei gave an interview in which she was asked to describe her Fifth Harmony bandmates. Fans weren’t satisfied with the less-thorough answer she gave for Camila Cabello: “Let’s see. Camila. Very quirky. Yeah, very quirky. Cute.”

The answer prompted headlines questioning whether the two women were “feuding”. The band’s own fan base then began to send bullying, racist tweets at Kordei. Although many of those tweets were eventually deleted, they included tweets saying that the singer “deserved to be lynched”, and several throwing racial slurs at Kordei, including “c--” and a “n----,” according to The New York Times.

Kordei’s Instagram and Twitter accounts are still active, but the singer hasn’t posted to them since announcing her social media break.

Gabby Douglas

Douglas won the individual all-around for the United States during the 2012 Olympics in London. Since then — but particularly in the past few weeks — she’s had her hair and her patriotism questioned by Olympics fans online. After losing her last chance to medal individually at the 2016 Games in Rio, Douglas talked to reporters about it all.

“I tried to stay off the internet because there’s just so much negativity,” she said. “Either it was about my hair or my hand not over my heart (on the medal podium) or I look depressed. ... It was hurtful. It was hurtful. It was. It’s been kind of a lot to deal with.”

Among the many things some on the internet decided were wrong about Douglas: that she stood at attention instead of with her hand over her heart during the national anthem; that she didn’t look cheerful enough for them as two of her teammates competed in the individual all-around; that her hair was not pleasant enough to look at for spectators. Douglas had a relatively disappointing trip to the 2016 Olympics as a gymnast, but it was the endless, petty criticism that drove her to tears during the news conference.

The Washington Post reporter Liz Clarke was at that news conference, where another reporter pressed Douglas to answer for these small details, rather than ask about her actual gymnastics performances in Rio. Clarke wrote:

“When Michael Phelps is hailed for his menacing scowl or celebrated for his during-anthem guffaws, one wonders what exactly inspires such anonymous shots at another Olympic champion such as Douglas.

“Putting aside such motivations for a moment, forcing Douglas to answer such baseless critiques in the moments following her final competition seemed cruel and unusual.”

Justin Bieber

Bieber deleted his Instagram account, which had nearly 80 million followers, after a public social media fight with Selena Gomez and a bunch of his own fans. The fight was apparently about Sofia Richie, with whom Bieber is rumoured to be in a relationship.

On Sunday night, Bieber told his fans he was going to “make my Instagram private if you guys don’t stop the hate this is getting out of hand,” addressing several nasty comments left on photos the singer posted of Richie and Bieber, E! reported. And then Gomez, who used to date Bieber, left a comment of her own: “If you can’t handle the hate then stop posting pictures of your girlfriend lol — it should be special between you two only.”

Bieber replied: “It’s funny to see people that used me for attention and still try to point the finger this way. Sad. All love. I’m not one for anyone receiving hate. Hope u all can be kind to my friends and each other. And yes I love my beliebers.”

Although Gomez has since said her comments were “selfish and pointless”, Bieber appears to be done with Instagram, at least for now. His account has disappeared. The singer now uses Facebook and Twitter.

—By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, August 19th, 2016