Last Wednesday, Curt Schilling posted a seemingly innocuous tweet congratulating his teenage daughter on her acceptance into college, where she will pitch next year.
Congrats to Gabby Schilling who will pitch for the Salve Regina Seahawks next year!!
— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) February 25, 2015
Afterwards, his feed was inundated with a lot of what we can expect from the lower levels of Twitter: vile, disgusting responses directed at both Curt and his daughter with unwanted sexual advances. Some of them were merely childish in nature such as invitations for a date to prom. Others crossed the line into what can only be described as sickening, and Schilling is not standing for it.
On his personal blog 38 Pitches, Schilling published a post on Sunday bringing to light the worst of the responses both he and his daughter have received in the last week. Two of the main culprits seemed to have been in a battle with each other over who could post the most outrageously offensive tweet. Schilling screen-grabbed a few of them and published them on his blog, but to give you an idea of the level of “humor” we’re dealing with, one of the tweets included the hashtag “#ButtStuff2015.” These two users have since deleted their Twitter accounts, or perhaps they were suspended as a first step in the right direction towards Twitter’s vow to address online bullying.
Had Schilling simply ignored these trolls, we most likely would have never heard from them, and they’d go on their merry way to bully their next victim. Being called out by someone who has an audience as large as Schilling’s has seemingly put a stop to that.
“What these kids are failing to realize, what this generation fails to realize is this; Everything they’ve just said and done? That is out there now, forever. It can, and in some cases will, follow them for the rest of their lives.”
Curt Schilling, fighting the dregs of Twitter one user at a time.
