Tess Daly, is a disabled beauty and fashion blogger and a former colleague at Disability Sheffield. Tess’s Instagram profile and YouTube Channel are hugely popular,with over 194,000 followers on Instagram alone.
Followers tune in to see Tess’s daily insights in to her make-up routines, ‘Outfit of the Day’ and her adventures around the UK as a disabled fashion blogger.
In a new BBC News video Tess details some of the horrific online abuse she has faced from online trolls and calls for more to be done to hold those responsible to account.
“There’s literally accounts out there that have been made just to troll me” Tess explains. “I would go cold, I would go really anxious and feel this horrible prickly feeling at the back of my neck.”
“People are now infiltrating you in your own bedroom. Minding your own business, scrolling your Instagram account and you’re getting bombarded with vile, vile words, and that needs to be taken seriously.”
Tess recently appeared alongside Rita Ora and Cara Delavine in Rimmel’s #IWillNotBeDeleted campaign against beauty cyber-bullying, and calls for more to be done to tackle online abuse, explaining that “when I did report the abusive comments, to my knowledge nothing got done about it.”
MP’s have recently backed Katie Price’s petition of Parliament calling to make online abuse a specific criminal offence and create a register of offenders. The petition lead to a debate in the House of Commons on 29 April 2019, which you can view here, or you can read the transcript.
How do you think online trolls should be tackled? Should the government do more to hold these people to account? Let us know in the comments below, on our Twitter or Facebook.