Mitchell Halliday, a 28-year-old make-up artist from Bolton who founded the brand Made By Mitchell and has worked with people including Kim Kardashian, posted a video of a red carpet look he created for the reality television figure Katie Price.
It drew tens of thousands of comments, some of which he said were "too vile" to repeat.
What he noticed
The detail that stopped him was not that the abuse existed. It was who it was aimed at, and who was writing it.
"I've seen a lot of social media so it doesn't really shock me anymore — but the women talking about Katie struck me," he said. "Some of it was just so vile and just straight to the attack."
Price, who became famous as the model Jordan in the late 1990s, has spoken publicly about body dysmorphia and about the cosmetic procedures she has had. Halliday said he had "not really ever seen this amount of cruelty before".
There is a line in his account worth sitting with: "It's almost like people think that we're not going to see the comments."
What he did about it
He said the episode left him feeling "quite sad", and that he was shocked so much negativity had arrived on a page he had nurtured for ten years and built a community around. Rather than delete and move on, he posted a video in defence of Price and of his brand.
His summary of what he wants the page to be is the most useful sentence in the story: "I want people to come to my platform and see that people who are doing things differently are celebrated."
On the work itself he was unbothered: "Katie loved the look and knowing I made her happy was all I cared about."
What it means in Bangladesh
Every part of this is familiar here, and the pile-on arrives faster because the comment culture on Bangladeshi Facebook is public, fast and largely unmoderated in Bangla. A single video of a woman — her clothes, her weight, her marriage, her surgery, her voice — can pull tens of thousands of comments within hours, and the cruellest are often from other women, exactly as Halliday observed.
Two things follow for anyone running a page here. First, moderation is a job, not an afterthought: turn on keyword filters for the words you already know will appear, restrict comments on posts featuring a guest, and hide rather than argue. A creator who invites someone onto their platform has taken on responsibility for what happens to them there.
Second, the target is rarely the creator. Halliday was not the one being attacked; his guest was. If you feature someone, expect to have to defend them, and decide before you post whether you are willing to.
The underlying pull is designed. We looked at why these platforms are so hard to put down in whether heavy use is addiction or habit, and at one platform's attempt to limit the exposure of younger users in Meta's teen time caps. Neither fixes a comment section. That still comes down to whoever owns the page.
