There’s a very fine line between telling your side of a story and creating a narrative that sends an army of strangers after someone else.

Suddenly, hundreds of strangers can feel entitled to judge a situation they know almost nothing about.

That is the side of social media we do not talk about enough.

I have spent most of my career working in social media, so I know better than most just how powerful it can be. I have watched it build businesses from kitchen tables, create communities, launch careers, raise enormous amounts of money for good causes and connect people who otherwise would never have met.

I genuinely love social media for all of those reasons. But I also know how quickly it can turn.

One screenshot, one Story and one framed version of events can completely reshape the narrative. 

That happened to me.

How did we even get here?

It started with a post about AI.

I came across a video from another business while searching Instagram for examples of AI-generated video content. The business had already publicly addressed the use of AI in a pinned comment after customers had commented about their dislike of it and, importantly, the original content remained live on its own platform – with the AI explanation pinned beneath it.

I took that to mean it remained something that could be discussed as part of the much wider conversation happening around AI in marketing.

That was genuinely the conversation I thought I was having: AI, authenticity, customer trust, how far brands should go with artificial intelligence, and how customers react. 

The words I shared alongside the post were:

“Customers won’t be fooled by AI. Don’t risk losing respect from your customers.”

That was it. It was a marketing observation about AI and customer trust.

It was NOT an attack on the woman behind the business. It was NOT a comment on her ability, her achievements or the success of her company, and it certainly was NOT an attempt to humiliate her or damage what she had built.

But that was not how she experienced it, and I can accept that.

As soon as I realised that sharing her AI reel to our stories had upset her, I removed it. It had been live for less than an hour and had been seen by only a couple of hundred people. 

Once I knew it had hurt somebody, leaving it there no longer felt right to me.

For me, that was simply the right thing to do.

I then contacted her privately and told her it had absolutely not been intended as criticism of her personally, her business or what she had built. I also apologised for the fact that it had upset her.

By then, however, something much bigger had already begun.

Although I hadn’t tagged her she had screenshot my story and publicly shared it on her Instagram Stories to an audience of more than 100,000 followers.

Alongside it, she wrote:

“Imagine being a female run company trying to tear down another female founded brand for trying to better her business at a time when she had absolutely no money or investment behind her.”

She also said she was “so disheartened to see another business behave like this” and finished with:

“Shame on you”, tagging my business account directly.

Anyone viewing that Story was no longer simply seeing a discussion about AI. They were being shown an interpretation of what had happened in which I was positioned as a female business owner deliberately trying to tear down another female-founded business.

Because my business was tagged, anyone watching could click directly through to my account.

And people did.

The messages started arriving.

What struck me most was how many of those people clearly did not know that my post had been live for less than an hour, that I had removed it as soon as I realised it had caused upset, that I had contacted her privately, or that I had apologised.

For many people, what they had seen appeared to be enough.

People were no longer simply disagreeing with something I had posted. They were making judgments about the kind of woman they believed I was.

That was the point at which, for me, this stopped being a disagreement about AI and became something much more personal.

By this stage, I had told her directly that I was being inundated with hateful messages.

Her response included the words:

“…I can’t take responsibility for how other people have chosen to respond.”

I have thought about that sentence a lot because, technically, she is right. We cannot control everybody who watches us. But we can control our own platform.

We can control what remains on it. We can control whether another person continues to be tagged. We can choose to remove a Story.

And when we know that something we have shared is contributing to a massive wave of hostility towards somebody else, we can decide whether we want to do anything to try to calm that situation.

That is the part I have struggled with.

The moment I realised my post had hurt her, mine came down. It had been there for less than an hour.

When I subsequently told her directly that I was being sent hateful messages, her Story remained live for the full 24 hours.

From my perspective, that was incredibly difficult to understand.

I felt completely misunderstood and, for the first time in a very long time online, incredibly vulnerable.

Perhaps the most painful part of this entire experience was being portrayed as a female business owner who deliberately tears other women down.

It bears absolutely no resemblance to who I am. Supporting women is not something I discovered because female empowerment became “fashionable” online. It has been part of my career for years.

I have personally mentored well over 1,000 women one-to-one. I mentor through multiple organisations, and a huge amount of that mentoring has been, and continues to be, completely free of charge.

I have spent countless hours helping women work through business problems, difficult decisions, growth challenges and all the things that come with trying to build something of your own.

I have listened to women who were ready to give up and encouraged women who did not believe they were capable. I have shared contacts, made introductions and passed on opportunities.

I have promoted female-founded businesses, recommended them, bought from them and given advice freely when I could easily have charged for it.

Most of that has happened quietly. There has been no announcement afterwards, no photograph, no need for acknowledgement and no expectation of praise.

I have never needed anyone to applaud me for doing it. I do it because I genuinely love helping people.

That is why being publicly characterised as the opposite of that was so painful.

It hurts.

Social media wants somebody to win and somebody to lose. It wants a good person and a bad person, someone to defend and someone to condemn.

I believe in accountability.

I was told my post had hurt somebody. I removed it, contacted her and apologised.

That, to me, is accountability.

I can own my part in what happened. I shared something that upset somebody. I removed it. I reached out. I apologised.

What I cannot own is an intention that was never there.

I did not set out to hurt another woman. I did not share something because I wanted to damage another female-founded business. That is simply not who I am.

My career does not reflect it. My actions do not reflect it. I will stand up for myself when I believe the narrative surrounding me has become very different from the truth I experienced.