It goes without saying that Ben O'Keeffe did not deserve the abuse he copped on his Instagram account.

And it goes without saying that the keyboard warriors who attacked him should be ashamed of themselves. 

But... 

I think it’s time that we moved on from simply complaining about trolling, and instead find a better way to protect ourselves from it.

The fact is, this is what life is like now that we have social media. There are keyboard warriors and they will attack anyone they have a problem with. In particular, people with high-profile jobs, like referees of big games.

No one in a big public facing job with an open social media account can be ignorant on this anymore.

I admire that people like Ben O'Keeffe call it out to try to stop it, but I don’t think they will ever work. Because people can be horrible, have been horrible since the start of time, and just have a new way of being horrible.

So if we accept that this is how it is, this is what I want you to think about- How do we equip our kids to deal with it as they grow up? 

And I reckon we have to teach them to do the opposite of what Ben O'Keeffe has just done, which is to read the horrible messages- and we know he’s done that, because he’s screengrabbed them and made collages and posted them to his Instagram account.

It is a trend on social media for the attacked to read the horrible messages, internalise all that hatred and then post a sad message in response hoping for an influx of sympathetic messages to soothe them.

That's unhealthy, because the damage is done and the messages have been read.

We have to teach our kids not to read them. First of all, they should make their social media accounts private and limit it to people who can be trusted.

But if they absolutely have to have a public social media account, they should not read what people say about them. Because these people don’t matter. The nice messages don’t matter, the horrible messages don’t matter.

I appreciate Ben O'Keeffe might have thought that putting himself through reading those messages and posting them to call it out might make a difference, but it won’t.

There are too many trolls and keyboard warriors and too little self-discipline about posting online.  The only way to beat the trolls is to not engage in the first place.

Because if you don’t read it, it can’t hurt you.

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