I never want to go viral again

It was a crisp but sunny Saturday morning in February 2023. I was on the Long Island Rail Road going towards Brooklyn. Scrolling on Twitter, I came across a quote from an actor that rubbed me the wrong way. (No, I won't say who it was or what they said.) So, I did what any Twitter addict does: I tweeted my opinion. To quote the great Julia Roberts, "Big mistake. Big. Huge."

Look I don't have a big Twitter account. At the time I had about 1.7k followers, and my account hasn't grown much since. I have my little bubble of mutuals and usually most of my tweets go unnoticed. My one brush with minor Twitter fame came when queer filmmaker Joel Schumacher died in June 2020. I happened to tweet about his death at the exact right time and my tweet was picked up by publications about social media reactions. That tweet got 1.8k likes, 300+ retweets, and 40+ replies. Big for me at the time, but hardly notable. I've had other tweets get some minor attention outside my bubble, but mostly positive.

Anyway, back to February 2023. I tweeted my opinion about that actor. Didn't tag them or use any hashtag. Perhaps I was a bit salty in my reaction to that actor's quote (the LIRR will do that to you). However I had no reason to believe that the tweet would reach anyone outside my bubble. But I was wrong. Somehow it got chewed up and spit out by the algorithm.

That tweet received: 14k likes, 5k retweets, 400+ comments, 8m views. 114k engagements, 12 new followers (yay) and 13k profile visits. By far the most engagement I have ever gotten. And 99% of it was very negative. The tweet led to a full 2 days of social media harassment. In my mentions: homophobic slurs, accusations of heinous crimes, insults for not being married (somehow this hurt the most...bro, I'm trying!!). No death threats, but close enough. It was wild. I knew that I could just switch my privacy settings or put my phone down. But there was a perverse curiosity about the situation. I just couldn't let it go. I read through all the comments, wondering how any human being could type out words so awful and hit send. All for an actor I didn't even know had such a protective and rabid fan base.

The mechanics of social media after Elon Musk feed negative tweets to people because they create the most engagement. That's just how social media works. I was thinking about the recent viral event where a woman on TikTok seemingly found a man cheating on his wife while on a flight and unleashed all of TikTok to find the wife and warn her. That whole thing made me so angry. This poor woman has her intimate business all over the Internet, with strangers the world over having an opinion on her life and marriage. And, what's worse, they're thinking they are doing her a solid in the name of sisterhood.

I don't care if that guy was cheating or not. No one deserves to have their lives turned upside down by social media, especially not some unsuspecting woman whose husband may or may not be cheating (no one knows the private details of their lives, nor should they). This family might be shattered and then the internet moves on leaving them to pick up the pieces. I certainly didn't deserve to get harassed online for a tweet I thought about for like maybe 15 seconds before sending out. While it's a good lesson to be more mindful when you tweet--especially when you engage in Discourse--one tweet shouldn't make you fair game for harassment.

When I was younger, I wanted to go viral. I thought it might be cool to be that famous. Maybe I was naive or just hungry for some external validation of existence in the digital space. Having now seen what virality does to someone...oh god please never again.