The cost of visibility - social media, artists and the price of being seen

Content warning: This essay discusses online hate directed towards marginalised communities, including racism, transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, harassment and threats.

Every time I see a marginalised artist gaining visibility online, I find myself opening the comments. Too often they are filled with hate. Not because of what they’ve shared, but because of who they are.

The worst part is that I'm rarely surprised anymore.

Criticism is part of making art. If you put something into the world, people are going to respond to it. Some people will love it. Some people won't. That's normal. Art should provoke conversation. It should challenge people. It should make people feel something.

What worries me is that so much of what I'm seeing online isn't criticism at all.

Over the past few years, I've watched artist after artist share genuinely incredible work online, only to be met with comments that have absolutely nothing to do with what they've created.

Instead, people fixate on the person. Their gender. Their race. Their sexuality. 

Being criticised for the quality of your work actually feels like a luxury now. At least then people are responding to the work itself.

I've watched in real-time the comment sections of posts by or about artists become entirely disconnected from the work itself. The conversation quickly shifts away from creativity and towards identity. Suddenly people aren't discussing the art anymore. They're discussing whether the person behind the art should even exist. 

This isn’t an arts problem. It’s a societal problem, and more specifically, a social media problem.

The wider social media picture

This trend isn’t just something I'm noticing anecdotally. Research from Goldsmiths, University of London found that 95% of Black and global majority young people in the UK had encountered violent or abusive racist content online, with researchers concluding that many young people experience social media as a place where "racism thrives unchecked". And at the same time, they felt platforms were not doing enough to respond. 

(It’s interesting to note that this research was funded by Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram).

Meanwhile, LGBTQ+ organisations continue to report high levels of anti-LGBTQ+ abuse. One parliamentary submission found that one in ten LGBTQ+ people had experienced homophobic, biphobic or transphobic abuse directed at them online in a single month. And once again, 65% of LGBTQ+ young people believed online platforms were unlikely to do anything when abuse was reported. 

Another study by Amnesty International found that less than half of Gen Z users consider social media a safe space at all. 

After spending enough time online it would be easy to assume that everyone is becoming more hateful. The evidence suggests otherwise. Research from the Public Discourse Foundation found that just 5% of users responsible for 78% of all hateful comments. Meanwhile, more than 70% of users never posted hate speech at all.

Most people aren't posting abuse. The problem is that a relatively small group

can dominate public conversation, particularly when social media algorithms amplify the loudest and most divisive voices. 

Why does it feel like hate is everywhere?

For a long time, I think many people believed society was moving in the right direction. Not perfectly, but forward still. More rights. More visibility. More representation. More conversations about inclusion.

Of course, many marginalised communities would rightly point out that the hate never disappeared. Racism, transphobia and homophobia didn't vanish. For a lot of people, these things remained a part of their reality regardless of how progressive society liked to imagine itself.

Maybe it simply became less socially acceptable to say certain things out loud. And now, thanks to a toxic combination of political rhetoric, algorithmic amplification and online anonymity, some of those barriers seem to be disappearing again.

What seems to have changed is not necessarily the number of people willing to express hateful views, but the confidence with which those people express them and the visibility those views are given once they're online.

It's difficult to separate this from the wider political climate around us. Across the UK and beyond, we're seeing increasing attacks on trans rights, rising anti-immigration rhetoric and far-right movements becoming louder and more confident in public spaces. The same narratives that appear at rallies, in political speeches and on news panels inevitably find their way into comment sections.

Amnesty's research found that 61% of Gen Z believe the words and actions of political leaders are contributing to the rise of divisive language online. That same study found that many young people see social media platforms themselves as actively contributing to the problem. 

Capitalising off the suffering of others

While ordinary people are encouraged to blame immigrants, trans people, queer people or whoever the latest target happens to be, somebody else is profiting from the outrage. Politicians gain votes, media outlets gain clicks and social media platforms gain engagement. In the background, the real concentration of wealth and power remains largely untouched. 

Social media platforms are not neutral public spaces. They are businesses. Their job is to keep us engaged. The longer we stay online, the more adverts we see. The more adverts we see, the more money they make. 

A nuanced conversation about an artist’s latest release doesn't generate the same level of engagement as hundreds of strangers arguing about whether or not they should be wearing a dress.

The algorithm doesn't care whether attention is positive or negative. Attention is attention. And so the most divisive content rises to the surface, with the most hostile voices being rewarded with an audience.

I want to take a second to acknowledge something important. There are people who are genuinely filled with hate. There are racists. There are transphobes. There are homophobes. There are people who choose cruelty over compassion, both online and offline, and they should be held accountable for that. This isn't an attempt to excuse individual responsibility, but instead to ask why we've built digital spaces that reward those behaviours, amplify them and profit from them.

Pay to play - the cost of visibility in a digital world

The people who are most exposed to this aren’t the politicians, business men, or tech giants. They’re regular people, and in particular, artists. In 2026, being an artist doesn't just mean making art. It also means being a marketer, a promoter and a content creator. It means documenting your process, building an audience, sharing your work and constantly feeding platforms that demand visibility in exchange for opportunity.

For most artists, opting out isn’t an option. Promoting a gig, sharing an exhibition, crowdfunding, networking, applying for opportunities and reaching an audience are all things that rely heavily on having a presence online.

To switch off completely is a privilege many artists just don't have. And so they play the game. They log on, share their work and in return, many are forced to absorb unchecked levels of hostility.

The price of visibility increasingly feels like exposure to abuse. Sometimes it’s ridicule. Sometimes it's harassment. Sometimes it's death threats.

Building better online spaces

If someone repeatedly harassed customers in a venue, we'd expect them to be kicked out. If the venue owner instead put them on a stage because the arguments attracted bigger crowds, we'd question the owner's priorities.

Social media isn’t a force of nature. It’s a built environment. Every recommendation, algorithm and moderation policy is a design decision made by people. Platforms don't write hateful comments, but they do decide which comments are rewarded with visibility.

To be clear, this isn't an argument for a more heavily censored internet. Censorship and the over-policing of speech often ends up disproportionately impacting marginalised groups. The solution isn’t deciding what people should be allowed to say. It’s about redesigning the systems that decide what billions of people see every day: making recommendation algorithms more transparent, giving users more control over the content they see, holding accountable systems that amplify harmful content and tackling coordinated harassment and bot networks.

The internet has given artists extraordinary opportunities to reach audiences that would have once been impossible to find. But those opportunities shouldn't come with the expectation that abuse is simply part of the deal. 

Social media companies have become some of the most influential institutions in modern society. They don't just connect people - they shape public conversation, culture and increasingly, our understanding of each other. With that influence comes responsibility. Profit will always matter, but companies with this level of societal influence shouldn't only be judged by how successfully they maximise engagement. They should also be judged by how responsibly they manage the environments they've created. Because at the end of the day visibility as an artist should mean being seen for your work, not being targeted for who you are.

What we can do:

While we can't individually solve a systemic problem, there are still ways we can contribute to healthier online spaces:

• Don't feed the outrage economy. Rage-bait thrives on attention. Engage with the work instead of the hate. A comment, share or repost celebrating someone's creativity sends a much more valuable signal than another argument in the comments.

• Report abuse online. Particularly when it crosses into harassment, threats or hate speech. It's an imperfect system, but it's one of the few tools users have.

• Choose where you spend your attention. Social media rewards what keeps us scrolling. Spending more time engaging with creativity and community helps reinforce the kinds of spaces many of us want to see.

If you've experienced online hate

If you or someone you know has experienced online hate or harassment, Stop Hate UK provides support, advice and reporting services for victims of hate crime and online abuse.