The Stages of a Twitter Storm (2018) | Hacker News Reader

The Stages of a Twitter Storm (2018)

buzzfeed.com

27 pointsapsec11215 comments

For step 9, the media is great at cherry picking the tweets that support their narrative and turning it into a bigger deal than it really is. Seeing 2-3 tweets from people who make the most noise gives you the sense everyone is outraged.

In search of the buzztweet.

"that article pretty much nailed it" comment would probably be somewhere in its 29 steps :)

I would have expected BuzzFeed to be among the URLs that are banned on HN, or has the approach of banning entire media outlets been discarded? Iirc it was implemented a couple of years ago.

Anyway, the twist is that the original T-Shirt was already a joke.

If it doesn't exist for real, somebody should make it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7658520

> [dang, 2014:] Buzzfeed seem to be partly rebranding themselves with high-quality long articles. I thought this was excellent: http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/tom-lehrer (and posted it to HN to no avail). So yes, we've upgraded Buzzfeed from banned (stories get auto-killed) to lightweight (stories get a penalty, which moderators can override). A moderator saw the OP and marked it as solid.

Thanks for the information!

This is buzzfeed, one of the biggest contributors of this shit culture we now experience.

Just watch how they randomly call some arbitrary twitter account a nazi:

> 14. Then suddenly there are Nazis everywhere.

This outrage culture is horrible, Buzzfeed is a heavy contributor which makes them horrible and I wish people would just stop.

I'm not sure if this is satirical, but the user they called a Nazi has a Hitler pepe avatar and uses the "echo" meme. That's about as straightforward as you can get.

Otherwise, yeah. Buzzfeed often acts as an outrage factory - it gets clicks. Much of our media landscape is moving in that direction now because it's the most profitable form of "news".

I am not satirical. Maybe the troll is a nazi but honestly, no one can for sure know.

The hitler pepe meme is a meme making fun of the fact that many media outlets are happily using the term nazi against everyone they dislike.

It's pretty obvious that the account is a troll account and that they are a big parody of the outrage culture by using the exact same outrage but with a twist.

By even acknowledging any of these outrage trolls they show that they are no better and is in the sandbox with them. This is the level of Buzzfeed, they belong with the trolls throwing sand at each other.

Guy, you do realise that the entire story is made up? None of those tweets or accounts are real?

Sheesh.

yes it's a fake example, but the general trend is real. You can see real instances of this mock story play out regularly.

No, I did not realize that.

How could I know? There is no text explaining that this isn't real and the screenshots look real enough.

It's not like the story would be uncommon or important enough that I'd care to actually look it up myself.

If they are mocking the outrage culture, it may be even worse since Buzzfeed is one of the media outlets carrying a big part of developing it.

Woosh.

So you entirely missed the point of the satire, got outraged, and yet Buzzfeed is the one with the outrage problem?

I'd like to applaud the person making up the fake names and bios, because they are absolutely spot on parodies.

all that stuff started out as a troll, but ended up with legitimate Nazis. The problem with pretending to be a Nazi on the internet for kicks (well, one of them - there's plenty) is that no-one knows your real views - all they have is your outwardly-projected views, which are those of a Nazi. This upsets the outraged, as is the intention, but it also makes people who aren't familiar with the culture war think that there's an upswell of Nazis, and makes legitimate Nazis think they're in good company.

It's stupid and dangerous on both sides, and I really wish this wasn't the game that everyone was playing on the internet now.

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