According to Politics USA, Twitter has pulled #GodIsNotGreat but left, or reinstated, #ReasonstoBeatYourGirlfriend as trending topic hashtag thingies. I had no idea Twitter controlled which terms are used but I’m glad they can pull offensive ones. But obviously they screwed this one up.
Folks, “god is not great” is not offensive. “Reasons to beat your girlfriend” is.
You totally shouldn’t be alarmed just because 20% of American women have been raped and 25% have been attacked by a husband or partner, I mean that’s only like 1/4 of all American women. Yeah, this is just so darn funny. Also, there is zero connection between participating in the great joke of tweeting out reasons to beat your girlfriend and the actual astounding level of violence aimed at American women. It’s not as if the attitude that it’s funny makes it okay or anything.
It’s just a joke. Lighten up, FemiNazis!
OK, now what you should do is tweet this post and the article I linked to and see what happens.
UPDATE: Gizmodo, and various religous moderates and stuff, claim that none of this is true. See this.
Here’s the tweet I just sent out:
#reasonstoCHOPyourboyfriendsballsoff Because they use hashtags like #reasonstobeatyourgirlfriend and think it’s funny. Pass it on.
According to this Buzzfeed infographic, Wikileaks spiked sufficiently and maintained a trending status for three days. I realize that’s very little to go on, but I have to ask: If #GodIsNotGreat was trending this morning, and only gained as the confused and irate religious kept it going, how did it lose that status so quickly?
Twitter works in mysterious ways.
Oh damn. Buzzfeed infographic here:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrismenning/is-twitter-censoring-wikileaks
@Greg Laden Twitter doesn’t censor trends http://bit.ly/tLSQ4b
I’ve had to explain this feature of Twitter to people in other contexts before. If anything, I think that having your trending topic disappear means you’ve won, basically. Your hashtag reached everyone who was likely to reuse it, and they did, and Twitter is now saturated with it.
Non-twitter user here but it seems to me failry obvious that “beating your girlfriend” doesn’t necessarily mean physically beating her.
“Beating” after all has more than one meaning.
It could mean beating her at sports, to the remote control, for mutually agreed S&M pleasure (not something that floats my boat but not going to say it won’t work for others) and so on.
So in many ways it could be taken as harmless and inoffensive couldn’t it?