Sinead Corcoran/ Stuff.com
A hate-follow is exactly what it sounds like – it’s the term that describes following someone on social media even though you truly cannot stand them.
Dyson-promoting mummy bloggers, for example. Instagram “influencers” endlessly unboxing free PR gifts, PDA-obsessed couples who do that heart-hands pose in photos, or that guy from Tinder who ghosted you after three weeks of dating (but you didn’t want to look like a psycho so you never unfollowed him).
The degree of irk obviously depends on how insufferable their content is.
If they’re only moderately insufferable, you might not even realise you’re hate-following someone. Sometimes, you might even subconsciously go through all the hate-follow natural responses – like rolling your eyes, huffing or even screenshooting their post and sending it to your friend, with a text saying “I just cannot”.
WHAT MAKES A ‘GOOD’ HATE-FOLLOW?
Think about the people you hate-follow. I bet they’ve got these things in common: wealth, privilege, what looks like an abundance of free time (these people traditionally never appear to be at work), an overall better-looking life than you, topped off with a healthy dose of narcissism.
“I hate-follow YouTubers, like Zoella and Tanya Burr,” admits my colleague Kate Robertson.
“Burr seems like a genuinely nice person, but her struggles are unrelatable. She can afford Barry’s Bootcamp. I will never be able to afford Barry’s Bootcamp. I used to watch their videos in my second year of uni – broke and miserable – to lean into my own sadness and depression. Even though their excessive lifestyles and privilege makes me sick, I will watch their vlogs for hours.”
My friend Henry has a niche hate-follow fetish for New Zealand “influencers” and sadistically derives a huge amount of pleasure from watching them “slip up” on social media.
“I purposely hate-follow a former reality TV star. He clearly prides himself on being a D-list New Zealand celeb, so there is a delicious schadenfreude involved in watching him bumble through his Instagram Story updates with glaring grammatical errors and a comedic speech impediment.”
Like Henry, I am personally a Big Time hate-follower of Instagram influencers myself, but for selfish reasons. As I’m an avid Instagram Story poster, I almost use my hate-followees as a gauge to which I measure my own likelihood of being hate-followed.
“Am I maintaining an acceptable level of self-promotion, because I’m counteracting my narcissism with my humorous but self-deprecating personal brand?” I’ll often wonder.
The answer is “probably not”, so there is no doubt in my mind that a huge portion of my followers are there purely out of hatred, and I absolutely do not blame them.
WHY DO WE HATE-FOLLOW?
According to the social comparison theory, we determine our personal self-worth based on how we compare to others around us.
Initially proposed by social psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954, social comparison theory centres on the belief that there is a drive within individuals to gain accurate self-evaluations.
Benjamin Ellery, a PHD student at Canterbury University who works in online communication, says hate-following feels good because it lets us define ourselves by what we oppose, which he says is a lazy way of building an identity.
“If we can look at people we hate and say ‘at least I know I’m nothing like that’, it’s a lot easier than doing the work of deciding what we actually are,” explains Ellery.
Dr Ciara Cremin from The University of Auckland agrees and also thinks that the object of hate is just a vehicle onto which we project our own frustrations with our lives.
“Hate-follows are not randomly chosen, but reflect what the person who hates cannot come to terms with in themselves,” she says.
Do you predominantly hate-follow very wealthy and seemingly naturally-thin people who appear to constantly be on holiday in Bali? Don’t worry, me too.
THE RISKS OF HATE-FOLLOWING
Ellery says that if we’re only following insufferable people with insufferable content and opinions, it can alienate us from the real people who disagree with us – which can be problematic, particularly in terms of politics.”Nobody’s going to hate-follow someone with moderate and considered views, so what we end up doing is exposing ourselves to only the most extreme or ridiculous versions of the other side’s views,” he says.”What feels like being open-minded could actually be working to make us more polarised.”
He also says that the real danger lies in how easy it is to gorge ourselves sick on “hatred”, like a buffet that never closes.
“Reality TV makes for good entertainment because it gives us a little 30-minute window where we can watch someone being stupid and feel like we’re better than them, but hate-following on social media might be more problematic because the proverbial TV never really turns off.”