Sorry for the long post. I analyse human behaviours for a living.
So, I was actually thinking about this last night. I do not think Sarah deletes comments and blocks “haters” for her “mental health” or to prevent herself from going into a “rage filled social media battle” like she stated in her podcast. If that was the truth, then she wouldn’t stalk this site or Reddit. I think she does it to gaslight people.
Think about it. If you see her do something and it makes you uncomfortable. What is one of the first things you are going to do? You are going to go straight to the comments section to see how other people are feeling. If all you see is a bunch of comments saying “oh wow I love this and I love you so much. You are incredible. You are so positive etc.,” and nothing calling out or discussing the behaviours that you found problematic, then you think there is something wrong with your reaction. You start to second guess yourself, you think “maybe I am just overreacting” “maybe its not that bad etc.” So you keep watching her. I believe this is the reason why she shifted from doing lots of Youtube vloging to essentially vlogging her life on insta stories. Comments on insta stories are private. Comments on Youtube are public. Doing insta stories helps her to control the reaction.
It’s like that psychology experiment where they have a number of people in on the experiment and only one true participant. They are in a waiting room and then a sound will go off every now and then and all the people in on the experiment stand up for 10 seconds and sit back down. After a couple of times, the true participant starts joining in and doing this completely pointless activity. Why? Because everyone else is doing it so it must be for a reason. They don’t want to be left out or made fun or be viewed as an outsider. They want to be part of the community. The same thing happens with Sarah’s Day. She creates this almost cult like community. People don’t see bad comments. So they think it is just them that feels that way. When they do see someone say something that calls her out, they see that comment get deleted and that person get blocked. The same thing happens on her fan pages Sarah’s Day Squad etc. It is a very clear message “speak out and you will be exiled.” Once again preying on the innate human need to be accepted and feel like you belong. So those who start to feel uncomfortable are also afraid to speak out because they don’t want to lose the little online community they are a part of. I have witnessed so many people get hurt/outraged and feel isolated when they are blocked not just by Sarah but when they are blocked by the fan pages.
This strategy works so well. It only falls apart when she is inundated with very valid criticism like the BLM controversy or holding onto the bushfire money. There is too many voices and she is literally unable to silence everyone fast enough. As a result, she is forced to address the complaints, but she always does it in the same way. Bring up all of the hate, blame a bank teller or her sheltered upbringing. Cry cry cry and try to gather as much sympathy as she can. This doesn’t work on everyone thankfully and she lost a lot of followers following each of these events but this strategy does work on a lot of people who continue to follow her because they feel sorry for her and believe her crying is a sign of genuine remorse.
Spot on!
We have touched on the topic of her gaslighting her followers on a couple of previous threads but you explained it brilliantly.
This is what got me as well - i wasn't going to go into the topic of how I got on and off sez (just because i've mentioned it a few times in the threads but loved reading all of yours!) but it comes down to gaslighting really.
I found her quite at the beginning, I think she only had like 15 videos on her account and I watched them all. I loved her positive attitude and she seemed like someone who was all about being strong (back then she did more handstands, yoga inversions and things like that), which inspired me. I then followed her religiously, did her stupid workouts, developed an ED, the usual "i follow sezza" starter pack.
I started questioning her when she lost her period but kept working out regularly and completely ignoring it. Her content became really repetitive as well with a lot of contradictions. I kept thinking to myself like "i'm sure you said the opposite last week", trying to read through the comments and not finding anything similar. I was like.. surely I'm not the only one thinking that. But I must have been right? In a way it felt so.. lonely and horrible, like am I the only one seeing something wrong here? And then she did the 5k runs while losing her period and got looaaads of comments on the fact that you really shouldn't do 2 workouts a day when you've lost your period. There was one comment which I interacted with and it had hundreds of likes and replies etc, it was a fairly nice one as well, no hate what so ever. I went back one day to read more replies and it was gone.. completely... and then it hit me
Ofcourse I am not the only one seeing her questionable behaviours. She is just creating her own narrative, making you think that you're the only one thinking those things. I then found the sarahs day rants page and from there on GG etc.
I can just remember so vividly how I genuinely thought that I was going crazy. And then I found GG etc and it was like that "Spoiler alert" episode from HIMYM when the glass shatters. And it just kept shattering lol. Everything I had thought about her got validation. All of my passing thoughts that I threw in the "maybe it's just me" pile got some type of confirmation. It was a wonderful liberating moment haha.
I think that's one of the reasons why a lot of us cannot just stop following her and might get personal with her etc. Because that kind of gaslighting (raise your hand if you've been personally victimized by sarahs day lol), it felt personal. Especially after putting so much of my attention and energy into her and then being made to feel like this..
Look - this is why I didn't want to get into this topic lol, it always comes out as such a long rant haha. Well, rant over.
I have to admit this gave me a good laugh. 
sure, they can make a joke about ‘not our fault if you get fudge nice cream for dinner!’ but in reality people won’t find that funny, but just get frustrated that they have to spin the wheel five times to get something vaguely resembling a dinner
