Thousands Are Tweeting the Exact Same Joke About Elon’s Twitter Fiasco

Digital activism began with KONY 2012, which requested individuals to focus on the crimes of an African warlord in an try to help a world manhunt to catch him. The ALS ice bucket problem aimed to boost consciousness of the horrors of a degenerative illness.

The newest iteration of what’s additionally referred to as “clicktivism” has a barely much less noble, however no much less motivating, aim: To make enjoyable of Elon Musk.

Thousands of Twitter customers have posted the same single phrase—“buying twitter for $44 billion to make it worthless in the span of 2 weeks is the closest elon musk will get to donating money”—since 3 pm Eastern Time Tuesday on the exhortation of a social media marketer to bombard the platform with the message.

Saeed Awawdeh, a 25-year-old engaged on social media advertising and marketing in New York, who posts as @SaeedDiCaprio on Twitter, first got here up with the thought earlier in the present day whereas working at dwelling. “This was orchestrated during my bathroom break ngl to u,” he stated by way of—what else?—Twitter DM.

The social media marketer says he shortly threw the tweet collectively in a brief break from his desk, earlier than posting it to the social community. “There were no thoughts in my head,” he says. “I just tweeted it and called it a day, I guess.” However, he does admit that the missive stemmed from an anxiousness about the way forward for Twitter, which Musk has stated may fall into chapter 11 if large modifications should not made to its staffing and enterprise mannequin.

“I’ve been a content creator on the app for a while now, so seeing a lot of my friends leave the platform, as well as not knowing if my job of running the Twitter of different companies will even be here in two weeks kind of sucks,” he says.

The original tossed-off tweet has captured the imagination, with thousands of users deciding to join in by tweeting the same text. “I’m happy with the spread of the tweet,” says Awawdeh. “My favorite part about Twitter is being part of a conversation and a community, and being the one to spearhead that always leaves a feeling of satisfaction when it does happen.” He tweeted a screenshot of what appeared to be a notice from Twitter of a violation of the social network’s hateful conduct policy and a demand to delete the tweet, but he told Gizmodo the image was a joke.

Among those joining in is Pease Anderson, a table top roleplaying game designer and journalist from Chicago, IL. He decided to tweet the phrase after becoming exasperated at the direction of travel Twitter was headed under Musk. “Every day I wake up to see this site drawn and quartered a little bit more by a ruthless owner,” he says. “The least we can do is work collectively to shitpost our way through it.”

“The meme is obviously humorous because it’s almost playing at a serious political movement, it started as a throwaway joke and nobody actually expects anything meaningful or material to come from this,” says Alex Turvy, a meme researcher at Tulane University in New Orleans. “But the provocation is also important: Musk has turned into this common enemy—he’s literally made himself formally the Twitter character of the day for…ever?—and it’s a way of feeling like people have some agency or efficacy against this way more powerful person who couldn’t care less about users.”

The grassroots, Twitter-born protest has similarities with the sorts of copypasta (blocks of meme-worthy text that are copied and pasted across the internet) that are often more commonly used by Musk supporters. It also has echoes of the scene from the 1960 movie Spartacus, where hundreds of individuals stand up to claim they’re the eponymous character played by Kirk Douglas while saying “I’m Spartacus!”.

Turvy believes that shared understanding is what makes this such a potent meme. “It’s been hard to keep up with each day’s Twitter chaos, but this project seems like it’s going to stick in the collective Twitter memory as part of the ‘jokelore’ that relies on a cultural memory that is shared collectively,” he says.

As for what Awawdeh hopes to achieve? Recognition from Musk that the billionairemay have made a misstep (or several). “The people that make this app what it is are truly not satisfied with the direction he’s taking the app in,” he says. “I have been a loyal creator on here, and having generated billions of impressions and engagements within the platform without getting paid by the platform itself— I felt that a paywall to access the reach that I have built was a slap in the face to Twitter creators, including myself.”