‘Once upon a time, the internet was a place you visited, a place you could leave’: Amelia Tait. Composite: Suki Dhanda/The Guardian and Guardian Design View image in fullscreen ‘Once upon a time, the internet was a place you visited, a place you could leave’: Amelia Tait. Composite: Suki Dhanda/The Guardian and Guardian Design Online abuse I dived into my digital past to revisit my most cringe teenage moments – and realised how lucky I am to not be young and online today Twenty years ago I briefly became the victim of a viral pile-on – all because of a silly YouTube video. But I’m glad I had the chance to embarrass myself and move on. Are today’s teens so fortunate?
Amelia Tait Sat 20 Jun 2026 07.00 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google A s a teenager, I went kind of viral – and the most amazing thing about that is it had absolutely zero effect on my life. It was the summer holidays in 2006, and my friends Jessie, Emma and I decided to film ourselves singing along to our favourite song. We were overheated and hyperactive, jumping up and down and headbanging, stretching our arms to the heavens as we confessed to our mamas that we’d “just killed a maaaaaan” before asking Scaramouche if he’d do the fandango.
Later, I added a couple of captions to the video implying we were drunk, even though I was 14 and the closest I’d been to buzzed was the pure placebo of clutching a glass bottle of J2O. Then – for reasons that are now lost to me – I uploaded the video to YouTube a month later, on 19 September 2006, under the title “Bohemian Crap-sody”.
The comments drizzled in, then came the downpour. “There is a special place for girls like you in hell,” wrote one man. “I now understand why people become serial killers,” offered another. A far more straightforward missive – my personal favourite death threat – simply announced: “They must die!” The video ultimately accumulated 48,526 views. And, sure, OK, I might have stretched the definition of “viral” just then, but it’s worth remembering that in May 2006 the most‑subscribed YouTube channel didn’t even have 3,000 followers. And more than 100 pages of hate comments will never not feel like a lot.
View image in fullscreen Amelia Tait, aged 14, a year after her video went viral. Photograph: courtesy of Amelia Tait You would think this experience might have left a scar, but I didn’t even mention it in my teenage diary. Five years later, in 2011, an almost-14-year-old named Rebecca Black posted her debut music video, Friday, and went eye-wateringly viral – the song became the most disliked YouTube video that year. Black had to drop out of school due to intense bullying, and the police even got involved after she received death threats. In the following years, the same thing happened to numerous other teenage girls. One California 17-year-old, Lauren Willey, was also unable to return to school after going viral, and later developed an eating disorder that she partly attributes to the hate comments.
Social media changed a lot between my video and these ones, but it has transformed even further since then, to the extent that the UK government wants to ban under-16s from the platforms . People have always hated teenage girls, of course, and there have never not been death threats. But once upon a time, the internet was a place you visited, a place you could leave. No one at school saw my video, and no one could easily screenshot it, download it or send it to each other’s phones, which means I retain…