OK, personal disclosure time. I don’t do “twitface” preferring, like the good nuns at our annual school ball, at least some degree of respectable social distancing...pauses for collective sigh of “Ok Boomer”. That said, there is such fun to be had in reading the mistypes of others as they breathlessly spew 280 characters onto a page and instantly tap ‘enter’ without pause for thought, context, or grammatical sensibility. It’s been an exhausting 12 months on Twitter. Will the site survive another year? Who cares.! Martin Hemming found these gems for The Sunday Times.
blunt humour
We began with the scandal of a highly paid podcaster spreading Covid misinformation on the world’s biggest streaming platform. Neil Young pulled his music in protest but if that didn’t work, surely a self-deprecating tweet from James Blunt would? Episode 1,904 of The Joe Rogan Experience is now available on Spotify.
2. Nailed it!
It’s the ultimate Twitter #goal: to get quote-tweeted by a Hollywood megastar. Calling a 76-year-old woman a slut is a high-stakes way to go about it, but for @theyarenotaboy2 the gamble paid off spectacularly.
3. A new Prime minister tweets….
We can’t say she didn’t warn us. (Tweet has since been removed.)
4. Waiting game
One advantage of the five-mile line to see Her Maj lying in state was that people had time to compose some great tweets. This is my favourite, combining the twin British obsessions of orderly queueing and public transport infrastructure.
5. The saddest word
In October the world as we know it tilted on its axis, as the social media site founded by an eccentric billionaire was bought by an eccentric billionaire. Some celebs feared the home of nuanced debate would turn into a hellscape of violence and lies (with cat gifs), and flounced off. Stephen Fry kept his farewell brief, with a 14-point word score. Though, of course, there is no situation in Scrabble where you’d have seven tiles lying face up on a table, so now who’s spreading fake news?
6. Whassup?
Behind the subtweet lols, the US beer brand was clearly pretty annoyed with Qatar after its eleventh-hour decision not to allow fans to buy their beer inside World Cup stadiums. The tweet was swiftly deleted when Budweiser remembered they still wanted to flog quite a lot of £12 bottles in the fan zones.
7. A word from the proprietor
So, in a victory for free speech or a sign that democracy lies in tatters, Elon Musk released a poll on whether Donald Trump’s Twitter life ban should be rescinded — 52 per cent said yes, 48 per cent said no. The voice of the people is the voice of God, so Trump is out of Twitter jail. He is, at the time of going to press, yet to tweet.
