How classic Hollywood stars dealt with their haters

Celebrities on "Mean Tweets" take note

Clint Eastwood
(Image credit: (Central Press/Getty Images))

In "Mean Tweets," a regular segment of Jimmy Kimmel Live, the host invites celebrities to read some of the most vicious things people have said about them on Twitter. Some are amusing ("David Blaine looks like his voice is putting his face to sleep") and some are lazy ("Benadict [sic] Cumberbatch what a d**khead") — but all are openly, violently cruel ("Ashton Kutcher needs to get hit by a bus. ASAP"). Kimmel thinks he's offering a service: "When you send an insulting tweet to a celebrity, a lot of the time they read them, and it can hurt."

In general, the internet is a war zone for celebrity-haters. Change.org, a site that has provided petitions for many worthy causes, lost a little credibility when it hosted a well-trafficked petition seeking to remove Ben Affleck as Batman in the upcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. "Affleck will fail as Batman and disappoint us all," says one of the many signatories. At the time of this writing, the petition had 97,431 supporters.

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Mark Juddery is a journalist and author based in Australia, who writes for Mental Floss, The Huffington Post, The Spectator and numerous other publications. His latest book, Best. Times. Ever. (Hardie Grant), published in Australia and the UK, explains why almost everything is better than it used to be.