The Nightmare World of a Tweet that Got 250k Likes
Going viral wasn’t as much fun as I’d hoped
I’d decided to give up drinking alcohol through November. Until I realised that the World Cup was taking place in November, that is. And, more precisely, that England were playing the USA on a Friday night in November.
Some things just aren’t meant to be.
And so on Friday the 25th, having spent the proceeding weeks steering clear of booze, after work but still in my suit, I opened a can of beer and it didn’t taste as heavenly as I’d hoped and I flopped onto the sofa and took out my phone. My kids weren’t back yet, there was an hour or so before kick-off, and I had time to kill.
‘How about I write a tweet?’ I thought.
About a month earlier, I’d posted a tweet that said ‘JUST NEED TO GET THAT *ONE* VIRAL TWEET BEFORE THE TAKEOVER AND I’LL BE HAPPY.’
As with many, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter had me question whether to continue on the site. It wasn’t so much his politics or his need to be seen to be funny (I can empathise with this) but more that it felt like a natural moment to divorce myself from social media. Other, more successful, tweeters were doing so and it wasn’t as if I’d ever achieved anything special there.
Minnie Driver had followed me. And unfollowed me. Within a single day.
My most successful tweet (in the thirteen or so years I’d been trying to grow an audience and/or enhance my brand) had received a few hundred retweets. And I’d been happy with that. It was a post offering my son £1 for every retweet, to reward him for being made ‘school captain’ and, not being an idiot, I specifically asked people not to retweet it in the full knowledge that this would encourage at least a handful of RTs.
(My son received no payment. I felt it an important lesson about how the tech world rewards creators.)
I didn’t leave the site, though, for three reasons:
- I’m a writer of children’s literature and through Twitter I’ve made a few decent connections with other people working in the book world.
- A grasping need for validation.
- Mastodon is terrible.
And so, on Friday night, having posted a tweet about the World Cup match that, at the time of writing, has 14 likes and no retweets, I thought back to a moment at work that had made me giggle.
I’m a teacher and, wandering from my classroom to the photocopier at lunch, I’d overheard a girl ask a boy if he wanted her number. They’d been leaving the building as I’d passed and couldn’t tell you what they looked like or who they were. I hadn’t looked.
As I stood photocopying a nineteenth-century love poem for that afternoon’s single lesson, it struck me how cruelly funny it would have been if the teenagers-in-love had taken their phones out (strictly against school rules inside) and I’d decided to confiscate the devices.
And so, some hours later, thinking of this, I opened Twitter and wrote:
As a teacher, you’re sometimes privileged to witness life moments. I saw a girl approach a boy to ask if he wanted her number. He paused, then pulled out his phone. Utter joy on the girl’s face. I then confiscated the phone as it’s against rules to have it out in the corridor.
It never happened.
It is a joke.
You’d be amazed (or maybe you wouldn’t) how many people failed to realise this.
You can normally tell fairly quickly if a tweet’s likely to take off. There’ll be an instant reaction, even if it’s from the dude in Chicago who always likes your posts, whatever the content.
This happened. And, within a few minutes, a few teacher accounts that I followed retweeted it. One, I noticed, had 20k followers. That was good, I remember thinking, some of their followers will retweet it too.
And they did. And they continued retweeting it. By the time I’d started watching the football, the joke was approaching 500 likes. I felt a warm fuzz of satisfaction. Or maybe that was the beer.
After the match, the numbers were in the thousands. (In stark contrast to the 0–0 game.) I showed my wife. She displayed mild bemusement and told me she thought the tweet ‘quite funny’.
Before bed, I wondered what exactly it was about the post that had caught people’s attention. Would I be able to replicate it? The tweet benefits from a classic joke set-up of a joke — you think it’s going one way and it ends up in another — there’s a punchline of sorts.
Teachers responding had, perhaps, found themselves in similar situations, whereby their empathy is in conflict with the school rules. No doubt, they, like me, would chose not to confiscate the phone — which is part of the joke.
Many kids are surprised that their instructors aren’t robots. You ought to see the look on a student’s face when they see you outside of school. It’s shock mixed with awe. A paradigm shift.
It wasn’t until the following morning that the earlier mild excitement, tempered by one of the most boring football matches I’ve ever sat through, turned to a stomach-churning worry.
There were 100k likes. Tens of thousands of retweets. Quite a few comments too. I’d also received text messages from friends.
‘Congratulations on finally going viral!’
I replied to the original tweet with a link to my latest book. I’d seen others do similar. This done, I briefly wondered whether I’d have been better linking to a charity but given that I thought it unlikely that anyone would buy my book, I thought it less likely still that a tweet would encourage charitable donation.
Not least because of the state of many of the replies. The mildest directly attacked me for being cruel, for ruining the chances of young love, for being hateful. The strongest … well … they were unpleasant.
Here’s a selection:
‘Kill yourself’ said one.
‘Cunt’ said another.
‘I hope you’re fired’ said a further.
I changed the conversation setting, restricting users’ ability to comment. I also muted notifications for the message. This had the instant effect of calming the alerts that were coming through at 100 likes every 30 seconds — I know this because I timed it.
In this new tranquility, I posted a further tweet.
Soon afterwards, I was forced to turn off the notifications and restrict the replies to this message too.
There are lots of unpleasant people out there. I don’t think I’ve ever realised that until this weekend. Maybe only ever in an abstract way. I guess I can understand if you don’t get the joke, if you think I was proudly boasting about ruining lives, but my sympathy doesn’t quite extend to thinking that suggesting I kill myself is a reasonable response.
Recently, an account I follow, and enjoy following, had tweeted a complaint about the amount of dick pics received and the lack of assistance from Twitter. At least, I guess, I wasn’t sent anything like that (I did close my DMs pretty quickly, though) but, I suppose, until you’re the focus of the hatred of thousands, it’s difficult to understand quite how unpleasant it all feels.
Much of the abuse seemed to come from American accounts. I don’t know if this means anything other than America is more populous than Britain or that, perhaps, across the Atlantic it’s more culturally acceptable to wish violent death upon strangers.
I don’t want to go into much detail about my place of employment, for the same reasons that I became worried by the tweet’s popularity, but I asked my wife if she thought I’d get in trouble and, phew, she said no because:
a) it was clearly a joke;
b) I never mentioned the school;
c) such rules against phones exist; and
d) it never actually happened.
That afternoon, past 150k likes, I thought to check Twitter analytics. The viral tweet had been ‘viewed’ by TEN MILLION people.
TEN MILLION.
A number larger than London’s entire population.
Roughly the entire population of Portugal.
It was such a large number, it was difficult to reconcile with reality. Imagine if my novels had been read by that number of people. I’d be so famous, it would be impossible to tweet. I could afford stuff.
I showed my wife the figure.
‘Wow,’ she said, looking up from my phone. ‘Will you get any money?’
‘No. But maybe some people might buy my books?’
It’s the lack of control that’s terrifying. That tweet’s out there now. Forever. And even if I delete the original post, thousands will continue to think I’m a jobsworth killjoy, out to destroy the love-lives of teenagers.
That hundreds of thousands think I wrote a funny joke eases the pain a little, though.
I was sent screenshots of screenshots, of users across social media posting/ripping off my tweet. Instagram’s Great British Memes, with its 1.5 million followers, posted it without linking to my account. Although they did me the service of not cropping out my name, part of me wonders how much money they make through recycling others’ content.
By now, unpleasant users had realised they could no longer reply directly to the message, so quote-retweeted with abhorrent messages instead.
‘Hope you die.’
‘Pure evil.’
‘This is why I hate teachers.’
I paraphrase because I don’t want to look up the tweets again — it would be upsetting … if it wasn’t funny.
Is it funny?
It’s now Sunday. The numbers have stabilised. And how have I benefitted?
I’ve gained about a thousand new followers. Many are American. Their profile pictures feature them showing their middle finger to the camera. They don’t seem a natural fit for my more routine tweets about books I’ve enjoyed.
Judging by my Amazon ranking, having my tweet read by 12 million users has, possibly, sold around five books. Unless millions have been out visiting their local book shops across the weekend.
It’s not fun having armies of people telling you that you’re evil and that you deserve to die. I’m not a politician. I wrote a jokey tweet about an imagined phone confiscation. I’m assuming most of the more offensive tweets were written by kids but that’s hardly a mollifying thought.
I’m still trying to find it funny. Is it funny?
Either way, here’s one clear outcome: I no longer wish to go viral.
Honestly.
Well … not for a week or so, at least.
And next time I’ll know to restrict who’s able to comment before posting.
For the time being, I’m still on Twitter at @cakesthebrain.
You can find my four children’s books at your local independent bookseller or, if it’s absolutely necessary, Amazon: https://amzn.eu/d/2UKBNlK
