Joy Taylor is the host of Speak on FS1, and has become a trusted and credible voice across the sports media industry. When Taylor was first starting her career in sports media in Miami, she devised a plan to combat the ramifications of social media, which was growing in prevalence and scope at the time. From the beginning, she encountered both praise and harsh criticism on the internet, but she always tried to look at the situations in a similar light.
In a recent appearance on South Beach Sessions with Dan Le Batard, Joy Taylor outlined how she used to approach messages on social media platforms and how that has changed over the ensuing years. As she has gained more experience and grown in the industry, she has been able to filter the seemingly incessant amount of feedback perpetuated from multiple sources and knows what is worth valuing.
“For a long time, if people have followed me on social, this was sort of a bit of my personality on the internet was to just fire back and kind of cook people and be very mean about it,” Taylor said. “I’m not going to lie – it was kind of fun; it was a bit of a sport. I’ll pick out one of these 10,000 idiots and embarrass them and then everyone pile on, and it just kind of became a thing.”
Taylor currently views social media as more of a business venture than a place to substantiate any genuine conversation. Within today’s dynamic media ecosystem, she feels that humans receive more feedback than they are designed to face, something that can be both good and bad. Le Batard opined that since Taylor is working to create pure sports media content, there is no need for the aggrandizement of doubt or feeling of perpetually being attacked.
“I don’t think you have to have a certain opinion about me or what I do or what I say, but these are not opinions,” Taylor replied. “They’re just attacks for the sake of, ‘I have access to this person and I have this evil thing I want to say.’”
In conversations with other women, Joy Taylor frequently discusses how she deals with and processes what is on social media. She outlined her mindset about being able to weigh the benefits with the inherent costs that come in utilizing these outlets. The key for her is not internalizing or interpreting any of the commentary as genuine, instead recognizing it as a forum where people have substantial access to get the attention of public figures.
“It’s all just sort of white noise,” Taylor said. “If 10,000 people a day tell me that I’m the most beautiful woman in the world, it means absolutely nothing to me. If 10,000 people tell me that they want me to go die, it means absolutely nothing to me. Both of these pockets are engagement, so I treat social media as a business, and if they want to say that, they can say it.”
Le Batard wondered how Joy Taylor was able to get to that point as she tried to discover her voice and make a name for herself in the industry. Despite regarding her as tougher than most people in the industry, he presumed that there had to be some facets of the platform that affected her during her formative years.
“I noticed always that I can make a lot more mistakes than the women could without it affecting my credibility,” Le Batard added.
“Even today, I can’t make a mistake,” Taylor said in response. “It’ll be a whole YouTube reel and there will be articles written about it; I can’t make mistakes. Early on, of course, it affects you, but very early on, I decided I wasn’t going to allow this anonymous feedback to hurt me because I can’t allow that anonymous feedback to make me feel good either.”
Through her comments, Taylor cautioned that if she were to allow the internet to affect her disposition, it would likely risk her perceiving things more negatively. As a media professional, she sees value in face-to-face communication and regards social media as not being completely authentic. Rather than allowing these platforms to impede her progress, she regards them as being in the background and staying focused on the tasks at hand.
“When you see people get very addicted to the praise on the internet, and I never wanted to fall into that because if you make yourself vulnerable to the praises, you will make yourself vulnerable to the criticism,” Joy Taylor said. “And the criticism is, as we’re discussing, so far off the pendulum of what actual feedback is that it will really affect you.”
