One hashtag, one tweet, one selfie. That’s all it takes to drastically change your life … for the worse.
A new Syfy Network series called “The Internet ruined my life” highlights examples of the Internet gone wrong.
Take Asian rights activist Suey Park. She created the hashtag #CancelColbert in response to a satirical segment on The Colbert Show that stereotyped Asians.
She meant the hashtag, which she tweeted, to be funny — but others didn’t see it that way. What followed were rape and death threats. Even Colbert asked viewers to stop firing back at Suey.
The threats continued and were so extreme that she had to use burner phones and frequently change where she was staying.
The show’s stories are told by people like Park in first-person interviews, coupled with reenactments of their experiences. The first 30 minute episode, which premieres March 9 at 10 p.m., features Park and Leigh van Bryan, a British man who was interrogated in the U.S. and deported for a tweet that was mistaken as a terrorist threat.
Future episodes tackle issues like revenge porn and what happens when your Facebook post goes viral.
“There continues to be so many headlines about these types of things happening,” said Heather Olander, a senior vice president at Syfy. “[The show] is about the dark side of technology, which is a very classic science fiction theme that we hear about in movies and books.”
She expects that the show will resonate with viewers, noting that that the stories are told by people “that are just like you or I.”
“All of us engage in social media,” she said, adding that many don’t realize just how powerful the information we put on the Internet can be. “There’s not a lot of recourse.”
Finally we should just really be careful what we post on the internet because who knows??
“Google has ears“.
