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<h3><a href="/go=news.detail&gid=439985" target="_blank">
Evans: Twitter will hurt your damn feelings
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<a href="/go=news.detail&gid=439985" ><img class="photo" src="http://img.mixedmartialarts.com/method=get&rs=70&q=75&x=54&y=16&w=310&h=165&ro=0&s=ufc-twitter-05-04-12-14-35-31-690.jpg" /></a>
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<p>Like or not, Twitter has become a main part of social interaction in our society, and in MMA, has become a way for fighters to talk directly to their fans, and in some cases, talk shit to each other. Ben Fowlkes this week wrote an interesting piece for MMAJunkie where he discussed how Twitter plays into our sport and interviewed some fighters on how they use it and are affected by it:</p>
“If I read a couple and get mad, and I feel like saying something back? That’s when I know I need to cool out for a second and turn it off,” Evans told MMAjunkie. “Because Twitter, it’s great, but Twitter will hurt your damn feelings, man.”
“People will say some outrageous things on there,” Evans said. “It makes you feel like, man, if I was there with you, I bet a million dollars you wouldn’t even want to think that because you’d be scared I might hear your thoughts and beat the hell out of you.”
If Twitter is rough on men in MMA, it's even rougher on women, where fans will not only criticize your fighting ability, but also your looks, emotional reactions and more:
“That’s every single day on my Twitter,” said UFC women’s bantamweight contender Miesha Tate. “Literally, every day. They don’t teach you how to deal with that. The UFC encourages you to be active on social media and have a Twitter and all that, but they don’t really tell you how to deal with dummies.”
“People who go out of their way to look you up so they can tell you they hate you, even though they’ve never even met you, chances are they probably don’t have an awesome life,” Tate said. “The normal, functioning people, they probably don’t spend their whole lives on Twitter telling people they don’t know that they don’t like them. The normal, successful fans of yours are probably at work right now.”
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