Fighters on social media: ‘Twitter will hurt your damn feelings, man’

When it comes to Twitter, former UFC light heavyweight champion Rashad Evans has some rules for himself.

The most important one is built around the principle that he must never, ever allow the criticism of strangers to “seep in” to his psyche.

“If I read a couple and get mad, and I feel like saying something back? That’s when I know I need to cool out for a second and turn it off,” Evans told MMAjunkie. “Because Twitter, it’s great, but Twitter will hurt your damn feelings, man.”

He’s right. Twitter will totally hurt your damn feelings, man. Even if you tell yourself it won’t. Even if you’re positive that you’re not the type of person who cares what other people think. If you have enough followers, and you stay on there long enough, eventually someone will write something to or about you that truly, genuinely bothers you.

You’ll know because at first you’ll insist that it doesn’t bother you. Then you’ll find yourself having an imaginary conversation with that person (or nameless, faceless Twitter handle) in the shower. Maybe you’ll even write and, if you’re smart, delete a few responses. Or maybe, like most people, you’ll have to learn by screwing up, sometimes over and over and over again.

For professional fighters, social media programs like Twitter can be especially infuriating. It’s like some experiment to figure out what happens when you take people who are used to being able to address their antagonists one-on-one, in person, inside a locked cage, and force (or at least strongly encourage) them to engage in a virtual world where formless tormentors appear out of nowhere to chip away at their delicate mental states from afar — something they’d probably never dream of doing in person.

“People will say some outrageous things on there,” Evans said. “It makes you feel like, man, if I was there with you, I bet a million dollars you wouldn’t even want to think that because you’d be scared I might hear your thoughts and beat the hell out of you.”

Many fighters simply aren’t built for that online interplay. Even the ones who have no problem handling it would probably rather not, especially when they have a fight to focus on, which also happens to be the time when some “fans” seem more likely to seek them out in order to tell them how much they suck and how badly they’re going to get beat up soon.

“That’s every single day on my Twitter,” said UFC women’s bantamweight contender Miesha Tate. “Literally, every day. They don’t teach you how to deal with that. The UFC encourages you to be active on social media and have a Twitter and all that, but they don’t really tell you how to deal with dummies.”

It’s not as if UFC president Dana White is exactly leading by example, either. His Twitter timeline is regularly punctuated by him hurling expletives at critics, mocking their profile photos or lack of followers, and generally sinking to the level of the lowest common social media denominator.

The crazy part is, he actually seems to enjoy that sort of interaction. Fighters typically don’t, maybe because theirs is a different kind of job. They know the day is coming when they’ll have to step into the spotlight and expose themselves for better or worse in an intimate competition that threatens to put all their flaws and frailties on full display for the viewing public.

The people sniping at them over Twitter, however, often remain wrapped in the comfort of online anonymity, which creates a certain built-in imbalance in the relationship between fighters and their online fans, according to Dr. Galen Clavio, a professor of sport communication at Indiana University who’s written extensively about pro sports and social media.

“There’s a certain power with anonymity,” Clavio said. “We’ve seen that before in message boards and other situations online where people don’t have to have their physical being in harm’s way. I think we also see it in arenas and stadiums, too. It’s one thing to walk up to a person and tell them that they suck. It’s another thing to be in a crowd of 18,000 people screaming that they suck.”

That’s a situation that MMA fighters might be more familiar with, and one that probably wouldn’t bother them nearly as much as being poked one at a time with all the individual needles of criticism that come via Twitter. It’s one thing to be booed by a hostile crowd. That’s part of the show. It’s another to know that every time you open the Twitter app on your phone, someone will probably be there trying to hurt your damn feelings, man.

According to Clavio, the reason people are bothered more by one than the other probably has something to do with expectations.

“A lot of the issues people end up having with social media affecting their psyche are because they go into it thinking it’s going to be something different from regular communication,” Clavio said. “If you’re in front of a crowd of a hundred people and they’re all yelling at you that you suck, most people are going to feel negative about that situation. We go into Twitter or Facebook and we know there’s a hundred people or a thousand or many more than that, but we don’t think about it in the same way. So when the same sort of thing happens, we tend to have an exponentially more negative response.”

Not that anyone could really blame you if you signed up for social media expecting something more friendly than a mob mentality. All the terminology suggests a more congenial atmosphere. Facebook friends. Twitter followers. These are opt-in services where people must actively seek one another out, and what kind of person goes to that trouble just to express a completely unsolicited vitriolic opinion to a stranger? The answer is, probably not such a great one.

“The Internet is not the nicest place in the world sometimes, and you will have people who seem to have negative things to say to you for no good reason,”  Clavio said. “That’s not an indictment of social media or the Internet; that’s an indictment of those people who are using it. You don’t have to take them seriously.”

That’s how UFC flyweight Joseph Benavidez sees it.

“I have to remind myself, who are these people?” he said. “You have no idea. You don’t know if they’re someone worth listening to.”

Or, as Tate put it, “I think social media has given a voice to some people who clearly never should have had one.”

That might be the hardest, yet most necessary, thing for fighters to remember when dealing with online hate from MMA fans, Tate noted.

“People who go out of their way to look you up so they can tell you they hate you, even though they’ve never even met you, chances are they probably don’t have an awesome life,”  Tate said. “The normal, functioning people, they probably don’t spend their whole lives on Twitter telling people they don’t know that they don’t like them. The normal, successful fans of yours are probably at work right now.”

It’s funny, though. You can know something like that intellectually, even remind yourself of it constantly, but it doesn’t make you bulletproof when you sign on to Twitter each day.

Tate, for instance, knows exactly what she can expect heading into her rematch with UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey at UFC 168 on Dec. 28, just like she knows what she’ll wake up to the following morning if she should happen to get armbarred for a second time by the reigning champ.

“I know it’ll be this never-ending story,” she said. “I’ll never live it down then. It does suck because that’s always in the back of your mind.”

But if fighters don’t like this brave new world, their options might be limited, according to Clavio.

“I think this is going to be the way athletes and fans interact going forward,” he said. “It’s going to have to be something that people adapt to because I don’t think there’s a way to put the genie back in the bottle, nor should we. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that we’re going in this direction.”

Even if there are bad things that come out of it, there are good ones too. Social media helps fighters who might not otherwise get the strongest push from promoters to cultivate and communicate with their own fan bases. It also occasionally helps to form real, meaningful connections that can’t be found at an autograph signing or a crowded arena. Just because the biggest jerks on Twitter might be most noticeable users at times, it doesn’t mean that they’re the majority.

“That’s why I keep doing it,” Tate said. “Because there’s been times when I feel just so tired of it. But then I look and see some young girl who tells me she started doing MMA because of me, or a mother who says her daughter looks up to me, and those people make it worth it. I have to take the good with the bad.”

If that doesn’t work, there’s always the block button. According to Benavidez, what might be even worse, at least to a person who is desperately seeking any sort of attention from a famous pro fighter, is the complete absence of a response.

“You might want to answer back, but what will hurt their feelings more is if you don’t even answer them, don’t even acknowledge that you saw it,” Benavidez said. “Because then, in their mind, it’s like they don’t even exist to you, like, did you even read their tweet? Did anybody?”

(Pictured: Rashad Evans)