Love Island's Amy Hart has opened up about how she learnt to deal with internet trolls after coming out of the villa, crediting the show for providing her with useful social media training.
In a new interview with Glamour magazine, the 27-year-old from Worthing, West Sussex said that when she and her fellow islanders received social media training prior to the start of the show, they assumed they would learn about things such as what to charge for sponsored posts.
However, Amy said they were surprised to find out that the advice would actually be about what to do when on the receiving end of a torrent of abusive comments.
The flight attendant explained that the focus of the social media training was to look after the contestants' "wellbeing" and to "protect" them.
The advice given during training, Amy divulged, included not to read comments from trolls, to block people who post hurtful comments and to report people to Instagram if they are "really awful".
Amy revealed that when she voluntarily exited the show on Tuesday 9 July, the first search result that appeared on Twitter when she typed in her name was "Amy Hart Love Island ugly", a term which was found in 180 tweets.
"I'm not interested in knowing what was said about me," the former islander added.
"I read it, I laugh, I block it."
Upon the recommendation of Love Island, Amy blocked certain words from appearing in the comments on her Instagram posts, including terms such as "fat" and "ugly".
Therefore, when online trolls attempt to leave rude comments on her profile, their remarks simply disappear.
"It's hilarious cause then all these trolls think they're getting at me, and actually they're just p***ing in the wind," Amy said with a grin.
In a recent interview with The Sun, Amy explained that she chose to leave Love Island in order to look after her mental health.
Amy had been romantically involved with fellow contestant Curtis Pritchard, who had later put an end to their relationship before embarking on a new one with Maura Higgins.
“I chose my mental health over the reality show,” Amy said. ”I was in a very horrible place over the last week, to be told that the gloves were off with Maura and I had to ‘brace myself’, like a storm.
"I knew I had to leave when I did. It's not nice. I have to put myself and my sanity first."
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