Online bullying: 'I've blocked nearly 10,000 abusive accounts'

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"I'd say at worst I was receiving 100 death threats a day online," Phoebe Jameson tells Radio 1 Newsbeat. "I have nearly 10,000 accounts blocked."

We've all struggled over the past year, going in and out of lockdown, but for 19-year-old Phoebe there's been no escape online.

She was first trolled after posting body positive photos and messages on social media.

And she reckons the pandemic made things worse.

A photo Phoebe posted to mark International Women's Day in March last year sparked a torrent of abuse and attracted "hundreds of comments" about how she looked.

'It's every single day'
"This kept happening across the whole of 2020. It got to the point where from July, I have not had a week's break from any online abuse.

"In these last couple of months, it's been every single day, there will be something or some incident or some comment."

Phoebe has been reporting abusive posts and blocking accounts that were sharing them.

Half of women and non-binary people polled by online abuse charity Glitch and the End Violence Against Women Coalition say they've experienced online abuse since the pandemic began.

And a poll of 2,000 people for the National Children's Bureau, which was published in November 2020, suggests that more people were experiencing and reporting online abuse as bullying in schools decreased - because most people were learning from home.Phoebe says comments and DMs led to her making a suicide attempt in December.

"It got to the point where the comments made me feel like I couldn't be here anymore, really. I ended up in hospital."

When she later posted about her suicide attempt online she received more abuse.

"It was horrific. I just logged off for the rest of Christmas and New Year to just enjoy it and not think about what's being said online," she says.

"I'm not in that place now, but I can't say I'm not going to be in that place again from trolling because, I didn't think that would ever happen to me, I never thought it would reach that point."

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