On August 13, Kari Rhyan was watching baseball alone at home, getting a little drunk on Starburst IPA and a little stoned on Durban Poison weed, scrolling through Twitter on her iPhone and looking for a fight.
At the same time Chrissy Teigen was watching — as it aired — the NBC talent competition “Bring the Funny,” one of several TV shows she stars in. She tweeted about one of the contestants she’d had to eliminate from the show: “THIS WAS THE CLOSEST DECISIONNNNNN my heart hurts.”
Rhyan, in a small city in Washington state, whose Twitter bio describes her as a “Disabled Veteran,” commented under Teigen’s tweet: “You are waaaaaay overrated.”
Improbably, in the deluge of her online interactions, Teigen noticed the message and retweeted it to her 11.4 million followers. She added her own comment, directed at Rhyan, whose followers totaled 185: “you aren’t rated at all soooooo.”
And with that, Rhyan was thrown into a Twitter maelstrom that has shaken up her year. “My notifications sprang up,” she told me after the incident. “They just kept coming and coming.”
As celebrities have developed enormous power on social media, regular nobodies can interact with them online like never before. Today, it’s reached the point where a wealthy, beautiful, powerful celebrity can easily demean a veteran on Twitter and no one even blinks.
“Ten years ago, when social media was first kind of getting going, [celebrities would be] posting pictures, they’re at a premiere,” said Jared Shapiro, a former celebrity magazine editor who is now the managing director at The Tag Experience, which advises celebrities on PR and social media. “What it’s evolved into is a super personal, moment-to-moment gut check. You get this wild peek into their lives.”
Teigen’s regular “gut checks” have helped her develop a rabidly loyal fan base — who lashed out at Rhyan with their own insults.
“They started questioning my gender and stuff like that because I have a strong jaw,” Rhyan said. “So they immediately went for gender — what are you, a boy or a girl?”
But one tweet in particular stopped Rhyan in her tracks.
“Disabled veteran?” said one user. “Maybe they should have finished the job.”
In 2016, Rhyan published an award-winning book called “Standby for Broadcast,” detailing the horrors she saw working as a nurse at a military hospital in Afghanistan and her resulting fight with PTSD. She doesn’t think her service or her wounded status excuses what she said to Teigen, but still, she was shocked.
“I’ve underestimated Twitter; I’ve underestimated its power,” the 46-year-old told me. “If I put my aggression out there, I’m going to get it back. While I thrive on the aggressive interactions, it hurts my feelings, too.”
(Reps for Teigen didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Dr. Tracy Alloway, a psychologist who studies mental health and social media, says that online interactions can get nasty because users get an instant dopamine hit when their comments are “liked.”
“If you say something mean, and right away someone says, ‘Hey, that was great. Well done’ … you’re going to keep exhibiting that behavior in order to seek out that reward,” Alloway said. “And … a lot of times, we may not even know the people that we’re responding to. We don’t have that sense of social cohesion that would ordinarily be the gatekeeper against these unkind comments.”
For someone like Rhyan, the result could have been dangerous. When asked if her Twitter battle might have mixed badly with her PTSD, she laughs, “Well, it certainly would have if I wasn’t on four different types of psych meds. If I was unmedicated and having to deal with this now, I would be absolutely devastated and manic and vengeful.”
Sometimes nasty online interactions with celebrities can have an upside. In September, pre-teen rap group ZN8tion goaded hip hop star Cardi B into talking about them after they released a “diss track” about her on Instagram Live, with lyrics including: “I don’t know what’s faker/Your life or your butt … Why you so lame/Seems all you do is talk loud and complain.”
Cardi B hit back hard on the same platform, with a screed aimed at the kids’ parents: “Artists have fanbases, right? So imagine if my fanbase was to talk mad crazy sh** about your kids because they felt offended that you were insulting me, their favorite artist. You would put your kids through getting dragged for your own [social media influence]?”
One member of ZN8tion, who uses the stage name “Hollywood,” told me the band wrote the song about Cardi B because they wanted to teach her “not to be a bully and give her a taste of her own medicine.”
But, it seems, they actually hoped to win online influence. And it worked. Before Cardi talked about them, they had 143,000 followers on Instagram. Three months later, that number had more than quadrupled to 631,000 — the point at which a social media account becomes seriously financially valuable.
Rhyan never got any financial reward for her Twitter spat (I reached out to her for this interview, and she never asked for publicity for her book). She says she now regrets ever starting the feud, not because of the battering she’s taken but “because I’m afraid that I hurt [Teigen’s] feelings.”
After the incident, she looked up Teigen’s profile on Wikipedia.
“The last thing that’s mentioned about her personal life is that she suffered from postpartum depression.
“She got me right where I got her; we attacked each other’s insecurity,” said Rhyan, laughing at the absurdity of it all. “But she didn’t know me, and I didn’t even know her. We didn’t know each other but we did this.”
This content was originally published here.