memes

Guess what? The person we made countless memes about has feelings and he got so hurt that he almost killed himself.

Abdel Rahman Al Shahrany, the person that was subject to social media’s latest meme craze has just appeared on Talkshow “Ya Halla” on Rotana Khalegya where he opened up about his experience with extreme bullying which put him on the verge of suicide!

During the show, Abdel Rahman talks about how he has been subjected to so much bullying both online and offline.

According to Abdel Rahman, people used to follow him on social media to troll and insult him in every way they could.

It didn’t stop there, though…

Abdel Rahman also tells the story of how people used to follow him in the street too and make fun of him, call him names, and take pictures of him without his consent!

Naturally, this amount of cruelty got to Abdel Rahman and affected him severely. So he got so depressed that he actually tried to commit suicide!

How did this all start?

Over the course of the past couple of months, the picture below became one of the leading memes on social media everywhere in the Arab world, especially Egypt.

memes

In an unprecedented speed, this picture spread all over meme pages and accounts on Facebook with different “jokes” written on it.

It actually became the number 1 meme in Egypt for a while there. And the entire “joke” behind the meme was depending on the way the person in the meme, Abdel Rahman, looked.

However, something people, ourselves included literally forgot or didn’t even acknowledge was the fact that there is a real person in this picture. It is not a comic or a character from a movie.

He is a person just like us who saw his face across numerous social media platforms literally being used as a “joke”! His face was even photoshopped on other pictures to make several memes out of it.

Who is he?

His name is Abdel Rahman Al Shahrany. He is a Saudi 20-year old man. Also known on his social media accounts as “The King of Al Azizia”.

A while back, Abdel Rahman started using social media like any of us to document social moments and events in his life. He ended up gaining quite a follower base. However, when he started getting cyberbullied, he took a step back from social media.

memes

It is worth mentioning that Abdel Rahman is a recovering cancer patient. In his interview on Rotana, Abdel Rahman speaks of how his cancer treatment affected his face, lips, and teeth permanently.

The danger of memes…

We all like to laugh. And we all share memes and laugh our hearts out. We are, in no way, playing angels here. We too use them in our articles.

However, memes, while seemingly are harmless fun, have the power of offending, insulting, and most of all detaching our human emotions to the point we treat everything, people included, as meme materials.

Before sharing a meme, it will make a world of difference if you took a second of your time to check-fact before you hit share. If what you are sharing on your account could be in any way harmful or offensive to anyone whatsoever, you could live without it. Your life will be the same.

However, the life of the person you are so blindly offending, will not. We have talked about this so many times before, shared stats and facts, told stories and spread awareness. So we can’t be surprised now to know that our words do matter and what we say does have the power of severely affecting someone to a fatal point, i.e bullying kills.

Your words, jokes, and memes do make a difference; make it a good one…