An entrepreneur who received 35,000 direct tweets in just 24 hours after her appearance on Big Brother says she won’t let the ‘trolls’ win by quitting social media.
Rebecca Jane says things got so bad at one point she had to get three people to manage her social media accounts and block abusive users after she was trending on Twitter.
The 33-year-old founded The Lady Detective Agency in 2009 and has gone on to become a best-selling author and a regular guest on TV shows including This Morning and Loose Women.
Jane said she’s regularly on the receiving end of derogatory and offensive posts but is more concerned about the impact social media has on children and teenagers.
“People were very vocal about the way I look; they called me fat and old and various other things,” she told BusinessCloud.
“It got to a point where I just couldn’t watch myself on television. I’m getting a bit better with it now, but at the time I just couldn’t stand to see myself on screen anymore. I’ve always been a confident person but the things that people were saying had got to me.”
Jane admits her appearance on Big Brother 2017, in which she was the third person to be evicted from the house, saw the attention she received on Twitter reach a whole new level.
“I was called all the names under the sun for the way that I looked,” she said.
“There were at least three people that night – and for the next week – managing all my social media and blocking people because the amount of abuse was just off the scale. It got to the point where I just couldn’t even look anymore.
“There are some people who are very prolific ‘trollers’, and they go out of their way to send you all the abuse in the world repeatedly. It’s not one or two comments, but a constant stream of it.”
Jane embarked on a weight-loss programme prior to her appearance on Big Brother and has since undergone several plastic surgery procedures to transform her appearance.
“Since Big Brother, I’ve gone through a lot of facial work like fillers, Botox, chemical peels and all sorts of other things to change my appearance because I’d had so much abuse about the way that I looked,” she said.
“You don’t have to be on television for this to happen; it happens to everybody and some people go out of their way to abuse people online.”
Despite her experience, Jane insists she has no regrets and that she has never come close to quitting social media for good.
“It’s something that pops into my head sometimes for about 30 seconds, but there’s no way I’m letting them win. I’m too stubborn for that.”