Ten years on from becoming a pop sensation when she was barely a teenager, Rebecca Black has opened up about the bullying and hate she received in its wake - admitting at the time that she felt 'completely overwhelmed'.
A decade ago 'Friday' made the then-13 year-old Black one of the most talked about new pop stars in the world, with the video for it being streamed over 30 million times on YouTube in the first month of release and climbing to number one on the Billboard Heatseekers chart.
However, when the Tosh.O blog posted about it under the headline 'Songwriting Isn't For Everyone', she found herself subjected to the sort of online hate comments, and even death threats, that are sadly all too common for stars these days.
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"I just remember being completely overwhelmed and not knowing what to do with it," Black recalled in an interview with VT. "I was really too young to understand it so a lot of it has been understood in hindsight."
Black only publicly came to terms with how the attention of keyboard warriors affected her as a child in an Instagram post a year ago, saying her 13-year-old self was 'terribly ashamed of herself and afraid of the world' and that she felt depression that she was unable to talk to anyone else about.
Now she says she has thicker skin, and added: "I think there's a very traditional storyline of somebody going through a lot of adversity and them becoming tougher or them becoming stronger or having a thick skin.
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"I have developed a thicker skin, I guess. But I don't think that that is what really helped me grow from it. I think it was learning to accept my vulnerability that made me a stronger person."
A mark of how Black has felt more able to deal with the trauma of her teenagehood and develop as a person came when she opened up about her sexuality last year, telling the Dating Straight Podcast that she had recently come out of a long-term relationship with a woman.
"Once I knew that I felt cemented in who I was, and knew a bit about who I was in that world and my sexuality, I really wanted to be able to talk about it," she continued.
"My experience with recognising my own place within the queer community didn't look the way that I thought that it would. So, for a long time, I denied myself the reality of what I was feeling because it didn't feel 'gay enough'."
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She added: "It didn't feel the way I had seen it represented in movies that I loved or TV shows that I loved or stories that I'd heard. So that's what made it more important for me to talk about it."
Now at peace with herself after all these years - and still only 23-years-old - Black has also revealed that she's been working on music, which is expected to see the light of day this year.
"I've been able to make some of my absolute favorite things that I've ever written through Zoom and FaceTime," she said.
Featured Image Credit: PA