Celebrities Read Mean Tweets is pants wettingly funny. It’s a segment on Jimmy Kimmel and famous people read awful thing trolls say about them online.
It’s funny because the celebrities are movies stars, award winning musicians and people with a lot of money and power. They are confident and sure of their success.
That’s why it works. The beautiful people turn these ridiculously personal and silly twitter posts around and we end up laughing at the trolls.
But if you were a teenager at high school, and people wrote offensive, hurtful and disgusting things about you, it would be an entirely different story.
That’s why this Canadian anti bullying ad is so powerful. The Kids Read Mean Tweets ad is set up like the Jimmy Kimmel segment. It has canned laughter, and on screen graphics and it looks like we’re in for a few LOLs.
But then these incredibly sad and embarrassed kids read out the horrible things that classmates, frenemies and strangers have posted to their social media sites.
It leaves you cold.
Bullying is very much at the forefront of parents minds when they send their kids off to school. We want our kids to be powerful, kind and confident. But regardless of how much we love them, nurture them and try to instill good values, there will always be bullies and victims.
This anti bullying campaign is powerful because it taps into pop culture, so it may have more of an impact on kids than a more clichéd approach, an approach where adults patronize kids and use cartoons to explain why bullying is not cool, man.
If you’re worried about bullying, A Mighty Girl has some excellent resources to help empower kids. Cyberbullying is a huge concern for parents and the Australian Cybersmart website has some great info and tips for parents and their kids.
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