On May 6, One Direction fans were crushed when former member Zayn Malik and current member Louis Tomlinson exchanged pretty harsh and vulgar words over Twitter. It started when 23-year-old Tomlinson threw shade at 22-year-old Malik and his new producer, ‘Naughty Boy’ , by indirectly tweeting about a recent picture Naughty Boy posted of him and Malik. Tomlinson compared the photo to something a 12 year old would “think was cool”. Of course, after this both Naughty Boy and Malik directly replied to Tomlinson, and fans everywhere freaked out.

Now, I don’t really care that the two former bandmates and best pals are feuding- I haven’t been a One Direction fan since seventh grade, so the destruction of their friendship isn’t really affecting me. However, Louis Tomlinson has 19.4 million followers on Twitter, and Malik has 14.6 million. That’s a total of 34 million people who are undoubtedly very distraught over this exchange between the two. This was proven by how I saw multiple tweets on my timeline about how people I follow were “crying” about the ordeal.

While the act of subtweeting is risky anyways and can cause some hard feelings, doing it when you have a 14 million people fanbase is not a smart move. Making all of your feuds public for all of your adoring fans to see just seems really unnecessary to me. Are One Direction members so important and self-absorbed that they can’t pick up their phones and simply text the person they’re mad at? They weren’t the last time I checked. So if you have over 14 million followers on Twitter, please keep your drama to yourself.