In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers share their experiences with online hate and the surprising lessons they learnt along the way.

Part 1: After debunking Bella Hadid’s treatment for chronic lyme disease, Fola Olusanya finds herself in a heated debate with another TikToker.

Fola Olusanya is a PhD student at NYU studying computational biomedicine, and has been a producer with Story Collider since 2022. She is also a writer and content creator.

Part 2: During the pandemic, infectious disease researcher and science communicator Laurel Bristow receives a flood of hate mail.

Laurel Bristow is an infectious disease researcher, science communicator, reluctant instagram baddie, and all around fan of tomfoolery. By day she creates public health education for general audiences and occasionally uses her free time and instagram to educate about infectious disease, and advance her personal vendetta against the cruise industry.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

I'm kind of a superhero, not in the saving‑the‑world way or in the starring-in-a-film-series-partially-funded-by-the-Department-of-Defense way. More in like the dual identity way. By day, I'm a PhD student. I study bacterial genomes using bioinformatics methods, which means I spend most of my day feeling like an idiot. But by night, I'm what many would call a niche internet microcelebrity. I've amassed almost 30,000 followers on TikTok simply by laying in my bed and ranting about TV and movies and pop culture. People ask for my opinion on things because they think I'm smart, and I'm eager to give it because I'm annoying.

I'm not a real celebrity, but I understand their plight. Like a real celebrity, I'm subject to a lot of hate comments, especially if I post something controversial online. But unlike a celebrity, I don't have an image to maintain, so I get to respond.

And I like to respond. I think I'm pretty good at responding. One time someone called me a bad word, and I said that he looked like the old baby man from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, like before he becomes Brad Pitt. Everyone's like screaming. Then another time, I told someone they looked like a sentient lump of goat cheese. Not even my greatest hits.

But when I'm at work, I feel like I'm not very good at my job. Like I said, I work in bioinformatics. I'm getting my PhD. So basically, I use computer programs to analyze bacterial DNA sequences to try to track their evolution, especially because we have a huge population in the hospital. So trying to see how resistance is developing and all that stuff.

One of the issues, though, is that the programs are not compatible with each other. So you take the output from one program and then you have to kind of mold it so it can be the input for the next program. But sometimes, the programs don't work, and sometimes their instructions are really badly written or the program was made in 2015, so it's not great.

I spend a lot of my workday needing the help of my co‑workers who are more experienced in programming than I am. When I tried to escape science by hanging out with my grad school friends, all they wanted to do was talk about science. So I couldn't really get away from, like, my torment.

Fola Olusanya shares her story at Caveat in New York, NY in July 2024. Photo by Zhen Qin.

But fortunately, at the end of my first year in my lab, I had a vacation to Florida planned to visit my family. I was going to be home for like a week. The great thing about Florida is that it's lawless and that there's literally no science there. It doesn't exist. Which was great, which meant I got to completely relax and unplug. I didn't even open my laptop. No bacteria, no genomes, just vibes.

After a couple of days of doing nothing, I got really bored, so I started making TikToks. I made like six TikToks in like 30 minutes. And one of those TikToks was about Bella Hadid's medical records. If you don't know who Bella Hadid is, she's a super, super, supermodel, and she suffers from chronic Lyme disease.

Lyme disease is caused by an infection from a tick‑borne bacterium. The bacteria is from the genus Borrelia, which I think is really cool, because most bacteria are like spheres or rods, and Borrelia is like a spiral, which is weird‑looking.

Basically, if you get bit by a tick, the tick has the bacteria in its saliva, and then the saliva gets into your bloodstream and you get infected with the bacteria. Apparently, it's very difficult. Lyme disease is very hard. I wouldn't know. I don't go outside. But, apparently, it's a really hard disease to go through.

I have heard that it takes some time to get over, but I feel like most people come out fine in the end. But sometimes you don't come out fine and your Lyme symptoms continue even after a couple of months, which is like the typical illness period.

So Bella Hadid has this chronic Lyme disease. Her Lyme didn't go away. So Bella has this chronic Lyme flare‑up and she posts a photo dump on Instagram. One of the pictures is, like, her in a field with a small animal. She's recovering from her illness. One of them is, like, her with an IV in her arm, and she's very demure.

But one of these pictures is of her health records. They were really weird. One of them, like one line of the health record said that her energy was in proper balance. And I was like, how do you even measure that? And then there was a bunch of stuff talking about her other pathogens she'd been infected with. She had parvo and Epstein‑Barr virus and intestinal flukes and Candida and Giardia.

I had just finished my Infectious Disease coursework because I'm a PhD student and so I was like very, you know, I knew these pathogens very well. I was like, “Why isn't she dead?”

So, I take a screenshot of the health records. I open TikTok. I do the little green screen function, so my head is floating on the screenshot. And I make a video saying, “I love Bella Hadid, but what the hell is this? How'd she get Giardia in Manhattan?” I added close captions, because we love accessibility. Then I posted it and I was on my way.

So the thing about being a niche internet microcelebrity is that you're kind of slave to an algorithm, the almighty algorithm. It dictates whether or not your content gets seen by anyone. Like you can have a bunch of followers and the algorithm won't show your stuff to anyone if it hates you.

And I have this conspiracy theory that the TikTok algorithm kind of knows if you spent a lot of time and effort on a video, because those are the ones that it shows to, like, four people. But the videos that you kind of toss up onto TikTok are the ones that go super mega viral and everyone sees them.

That happened with the Bella Hadid video. I think it got like 4.2 million. Terrifying. And the thing about going viral that's fun is like it starts kind of like as rain drops, like during a rainstorm, little drizzles and then the sky opens. And you're just getting likes and likes and comments and comments and people are just, I don't know, there's just so much going on and it's a whirlwind.

Part of me loves it because my dopamine centers in my brain have been deep fried, because I've been on social media since I was, like, 10. And so I'm like, “Oh, my God, people are commenting on my stuff. They're interacting with me. They like my stuff. They like me.”

But then the other part of me is like, “I'm being perceived and people can see me, and they can say things about me.”

I got a lot of comments on that video. Most of the people were like, “Oh, my God, ha‑ha, this is so funny. Why does she have parvo?” And I was like, “Yeah, why does she have parvo?”

But some people were really angry with me. They were like, “You are so insensitive.” They were yelling at me for not caring about her illness. And I paid most of them no mind.

I left Florida. I came back to New York and I was back at work. It was about two weeks after I posted the video. The video is just going viral. It's not really in the front of my brain anymore. But I get home from work one day and I'm really in the mood to unwind and scroll on my phone, and this girl comments on my video. We're going to call her Rudy because she was rude.

So she comments on my video and I'm just like in the mood to fight. She got me at the right place at the right time and I was just ready.

So Rudy comments on my video. She goes, “Wow. The ignorance is astounding.” Five g's. “You better hope to God you never get bit by a tick, resulting in a knocked down immune system and endless infections. Uneducated people like you are why this is a problem.”

And I said, “LMAO,” several o’s. “I'm actually getting my PhD in a Microbiology lab right now, so it's funny you would say that. That's just a lot of infections for one person.”

And she goes, “Ugh, you are never going to be a good physician with that attitude.”

And I was like, “Oh, you don't know the difference between an MD and a PhD?” And I did the little, I didn't even use an emoji. I used like the colon and the slash. It was like, ah.

I thought that was where it would end. I was like, you know, I've humiliated her. I've bested her. But it just made her want to go more. So just for an hour, we're just throwing insults back and forth at each other, finding innovative ways to call each other stupid.

She's like, “You're ignorant. You're uneducated. You're unempathetic. You should go and get bit by a tick and see how you like it since you're such a scientist.”

And I was like, “Well, that's not how science works.”

So we're doing this and I'm snappy. I'm just like, yeah, just getting all her weak points, even though I don't really know who this person is and her account is private. But I'm just like, you know.

I think I'm keeping my cool, then I kind of look down at my hands and they're sweaty. My hands are kind of shaking. You know when you can see your reflection in your phone, it's like, “Oh, no.”

So I was looking at it and I saw myself scowling. I was really pissed. I was like this girl had gotten so far under my skin for no real reason. And TikTok kind of censors comments, but if it hadn't, I would have been like, “Fuck you! I'm a scientist.”

I'm a scientist. I am a scientist. Even when my code doesn't work or I fail exams or when I'm watching reality TV, I'm a scientist. It's part of who I am. I wouldn't have looked twice at Bella Hadid's medical records had it not been for the scientist in me.

I wish I could tell you how the argument ended. She blocked me. I blocked her. I don't remember. I do remember that Bella Hadid removed that picture from her Instagram. It is gone. And I also remember that it just made me feel like, yeah, I can be a scientist, and no random TikTok user can take that away from me.

Thank you.

Part 2

Last week was a four‑year anniversary of the pandemic. Yeah, boo is right. It was a four‑year anniversary for everyone, but it was very specifically for me because, at the time, I was working at Midtown Hospital. I was leading clinical studies on infectious diseases, specifically respiratory pathogens. So you can imagine that things got pretty crazy for me pretty quickly.

I remember the timeline vividly. On March 11th, we had a meeting about if we should maybe pause our studies because it involved sending people into the rooms of people who had respiratory pathogens. And that time, the only thing that we really knew about COVID was that it was killing people and it was in the hospital. So we decided to stop those studies.

On March 12th, I made an Instagram post on my personal private Instagram saying, “Since I have so much free time right now,” which I didn't know was about to stop, “does anyone want me to make a story explaining what we know about COVID? I won't bother if no one's interested.” People said they were interested.

I made a story about what it meant to flatten the curve back when nobody knew what that meant. And friends asked if I would make my Instagram public so they could tell their friends to watch it.

I made my Instagram public. Overnight, I got 500 new followers. In 72 hours, I got 5,000 new followers, and then it just never stopped.

Laurel Bristow shares her story at Waller's Coffee shop in Atlanta, GA in March 2024. Photo by Rob Felt.

At this point, in spring of 2020, I was working 10, 12‑hour days in the hospital, six days a week, running clinical trials for COVID treatments, because the only way anyone could get these experimental drugs was to be in the trial and we felt obligated to get it to as many people as humanly possible.

And then I was coming home to my little apartment and my pets and continuing to read COVID articles, COVID papers, my DMs to look at questions, to make videos to help people who were so, so scared. I was happy to do this and work this much because coming home and continuing to work meant that I didn't have to think about what I was seeing in the hospital all day.

I didn't have to think about all of the people that were in there that were so scared and couldn't talk to their family. I didn't have to think about the amount of time that I spent running from the ICU to my office because somebody who had declined the study yesterday was getting progressively worse and was desperate for anything that might help them. But the airway team is in their room waiting to sedate them and put them on a ventilator for me to get a consent, so I need to hurry up.

I didn't have to think about how many of those people, myself and the airway team were the last people they talked to before they went under when they probably would have much preferred to talk to their family. And I didn't have to think about for how many of those people, myself and the airway team were the last people they ever spoke to.

So I got home and I kept working and I was happy to do it and I liked to do it. I liked being helpful. I felt obligated to do it because I had an understanding that other people didn't have. And I thought if I could give it to them, they might feel a little bit in control of a very scary situation.

And people liked that I was sharing this information. They liked it a lot. A lot of people liked it, and suddenly, I had half a million Instagram followers.

Going viral at a normal time is probably really weird, but doing it when your followers have literally nothing to do but look at their phones is a particular kind of surreal. I opened a PO Box because people asked if they could send me Christmas cards, and I got thousands. It was incredible.

Anyone who opened an Etsy shop during the pandemic sent me whatever they were making. I still have just piles of bespoke soaps, because everyone started making soap. It was great.

I also started getting DMs from celebrities who now knew my name and wanted to ask me questions and wanted my opinion, because having 450,000 Instagram followers and a blue check before you could buy them was really powerful. And with this power also comes an absolutely unhinged DM request box.

So I got all of the messages that you would normally expect someone like me to get, the hateful messages from trolls or conspiracy theorists or anti‑vaxxers, what have you. The thing that I got that really surprised me were annoying or frustrating or rude or inappropriate messages from people who liked me.

When you get as many messages as I do and you have to read all of them, which I did because that's how I learned what people needed me to talk about, you start to see patterns in people's behavior. One kind of person, for whatever reason, feels it necessary to correct you on something that is completely insignificant to, I don't know, feel powerful or feel smarter than me in some way.

The example that comes to mind is I once posted about a poem that I liked called For M that references a video of a penguin accidentally jumping on a sleeping walrus and waking it up, which is a video I knew. So I posted the video with the poem, because it was so funny. And somebody DM’d me to say, “I hate to tell you.” Didn't hate it enough not to send the DM. “But I hate to tell you, but that's an elephant seal, not a walrus.”

And I said, “Okay. I didn't write the poem, but thank you for letting me know.”

There's also the people who I would hear about some conspiracy theory or something that had caused people a lot of panic. I would read the paper, I would get the sources, I would fact‑check everything, compile it into a video, record it with a short turnaround time, hand caption it for accessibility, and someone would DM me not to thank me for my work but to tell me that I had made a typo that clearly had no impact on their ability to understand what I was saying.

But I think the worst kind of messages that I got that were the hardest for me were people sending me violent conspiracy theories or anti‑vax posts, and they weren’t asking if I could debunk it for them. They were just saying, “Can you believe this?”

I think people don’t really realize how much that wears on you. If half of a percent of my followers send me a message, that’s 2,000 messages, at least. So it's not one person sending me this violent conspiracy theory. It's 150 people. And it started to really, really wear on me because, yeah, I can believe it. I'm living it. I'm in the middle of it and I'm trying to deal with it. That's why my Instagram account exists.

I started getting really resentful for people who were really just trying to make a connection with me and commiserate with me. It got so bad at one point that I considered stopping altogether, but I just couldn't. There is something incredibly powerful about being needed in a crisis. And having a bunch of people ask for your opinion and your opinion only, your explanation is the only explanation that will do, especially when you're a Gemini, is like incredible.

So, I realized what was happening is that what I was really upset about was people depending on me when I had made myself dependable. So I started to try to take care of myself better. I did what everyone recommends and I stopped reading the comments, or in my case I stopped reading the DMs. I set up an email and said, “If you have questions, send it here.” And for whatever reason, that was enough space to make me feel better.

I really practiced trying to think, “Do you have a right to be mad at this message or are you looking for an excuse to feel put upon?” I even went as far as to make a set of stories explaining the boundaries for the kind of DMs that I would and would not like to be sent. Of course, somebody immediately DM'd me to tell me they came here for science, not to hear my boundaries. But after I blocked that person, I still felt better about just saying it out loud.

I think the real problem is that at this time, people were so desperate for connection and so isolated and lonely. Social media is the only outlet that they had to do that through, and that makes that really, really easy to get wrong.

A lot of the times people send me messages that say something like, “You need this,” or, “This is perfect for you.” And I used to get really annoyed by those, because I would think, here I am on this receiving end of this parasocial relationship, I wouldn't know you in a room full of people and yet you think you know me.

But I had to step back and think about it for a minute because, really, it's not that these people know me. It's that I have put a lot of myself on the internet and they have a connection to me and they feel like I am someone that they can trust and who has been with them through trying times. So they don't think they know me, they just think of me.

And now, when I get these messages that say, “You need this thing,” and it's a link to something that is so far from anything that I would ever spend money on or wear or have in my house, I don't have to be mad that they sent it. I can just be grateful that they thought of me when they saw it.

Because whether or not people know me is really irrelevant. I was able to be helpful at a time when people were desperate for help. And as a result, now when they see things like ‘shrimp’ or ‘Harry Styles’ or bad behavior on cruise ships, they think of me. And that's as real a connection as anything else.