Tiffany Haddish sings Whitney Houston after her panel during the LA Times Book Festival at the USC campus on Sunday, April 21, 2024, in Los Angeles, CA. Photo: Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times (Getty Images)
Every celebrity has various trolls who say mean things about them online, a fact of life for most famous people in the modern era. But Tiffany Haddish isn’t just a passive observer when people insult her on social media networks. Haddish says she’s tracked down people trolling her and has even given them a call, according to a new interview with the L.A. Times Thursday.
“I’ve learned how to find people’s information—like I pull up the credit report, police records. You can do that for $1.99,” Haddish told the L.A. Times. “Sometimes, I get so mad that I’ll get they phone number and I’ll just call them.”
The Girls Trip star told the newspaper that trolling got really bad in late 2022 after an anonymous lawsuit claimed she had “groomed” a young woman to appear in sexually suggestive comedy sketches. The lawsuit was dropped and the anonymous woman recanted her story, but it caused a flurry of activity online, with trolls calling her a “pedo.”
Haddish
told
the
L.A.
Times
that
she
started
an
Instagram
account
to
reply
to
the
trolls
anonymously,
but
that
wasn’t
enough.
When
she
took
the
next
step
and
contacted
them
directly
over
the
phone,
those
people
were
astonished
that
the
movie
star
had
actually
called
them.
And
it’s
easy
to
understand
their
confusion.
“They be shocked that I called. They’ll be like, ‘I can’t believe you even saw that.’ You did a whole video, [bitch]! You made a full, five-minute video! On the internet, people think they can just say whatever and you not gonna say anything. I try my best not to, but I’m a human being,” she told the L.A. Times.
Social media has obviously radically changed the way that average people can interact with celebrities, even though people have been exploiting new technologies since the early 20th century to harass famous people.
But there are so many people in the world hiding behind their keyboards that it seems unwise for a celebrity to engage in any meaningful way. Trolls often feed on the attention, and when word gets out that celebrities are just calling up random strangers on the internet, that’s surely going to incentivize more rude behavior.
Don’t
feed
the
trolls,
Tiffany.
If
you
try
to
call
every
mean
person
on
the
internet,
those
$2
charges
are
going
to
run
up
a
tab
that
even
a
millionaire
actress
can’t
pay.
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