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People Who Have Glass Twitter Accounts...

Brainster

Penultimate Amazing
Brainster
Joined
May 26, 2006
Messages
21,935
This one's almost too rich for words.

Basically, young man at college football game holds up sign asking for more beer money and including his Venmo account name. Sign gets shown on ESPN's gameday, and whaddya know, a day or so later young man discovers that there's $600 in the account. So he does the right thing, he decides to donate the money to the local children's hospital. His mom mentions this on Facebook and the whole thing explodes. Venmo and Busch (he mentioned Busch Light on his sign) offered to match whatever the kid raised, and before you know it, he's on Good Morning America, CNN, Fox and Friends, NBC, etc. Raises over $1 million for the children's hospital.

Kind of a local hero, right? Well, a reporter named Aaron Calvin for the Des Moines Register, decides to do some investigoogling, and discovers, shock of shock that the young man had said some racist things as a teenager (16). I can't seem to copy from the site, but it says that he tweeted two racist jokes, one comparing black mothers to gorillas and another "making light of black people killed in the holocaust (sic)."

Obviously objectionable, but seriously if you have to go back eight years to a sophomore in high school's account to find something stupid and objectionable, I'm already thinking the kid must be a saint. But as usual, it gets better. Because of course the reporter had a long-time twitter account, some rather embarrassing tweets of his were discovered:

Between 2010 and 2013, Calvin published tweets that used a racist slur for black people, made light of abusing women, used the word “gay” as a pejorative and mocked the legalization of same-sex marriage by saying he was “totally going to marry a horse.” The Register’s statement on Twitter was soon flooded with images of the reporter’s offensive comments.
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Whoops!
 
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Yes it is almost as if teenagers don't grow up and become mature adults!

Even if he was an out and out bad person, this does not mean he cannot do a good thing, and doing good things should be encouraged perhaps especially if done by a bad person. The fact that the journalist raised the issue at all just makes him seem petty and spiteful, even if the journalist had never said anything inappropriate.

OTOH, the fact that the journalist may have said some racist things in the past should not prevent him from pointing out racist behaviour in others, but this should be limited to 'public figures' and active behaviour not teen age bad taste in someone who is essentially a nonentity.
 
Brainster said:
This one's almost too rich for words.

Basically, young man at college football game holds up sign asking for more beer money and including his Venmo account name. Sign gets shown on ESPN's gameday, and whaddya know, a day or so later young man discovers that there's $600 in the account. So he does the right thing, he decides to donate the money to the local children's hospital. His mom mentions this on Facebook and the whole thing explodes. Venmo and Busch (he mentioned Busch Light on his sign) offered to match whatever the kid raised, and before you know it, he's on Good Morning America, CNN, Fox and Friends, NBC, etc. Raises over $1 million for the children's hospital.

Kind of a local hero, right? Well, a reporter named Aaron Calvin for the Des Moines Register, decides to do some investigoogling, and discovers, shock of shock that the young man had said some racist things as a teenager (16). I can't seem to copy from the site, but it says that he tweeted two racist jokes, one comparing black mothers to gorillas and another "making light of black people killed in the holocaust (sic)."

Obviously objectionable, but seriously if you have to go back eight years to a sophomore in high school's account to find something stupid and objectionable, I'm already thinking the kid must be a saint. But as usual, it gets better. Because of course the reporter had a long-time twitter account, some rather embarrassing tweets of his were discovered:



Whoops!
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No sympathy for him at all, I never felt I needed to.post racist comments and jokes on my Twitter account when I was 16!
 
No, having to use an old-fashioned typewriter and get hold of stamps and envelopes to share jokes in writing has probably saved the reputation of many teenagers as adults. :)
 
dann said:
No, having to use an old-fashioned typewriter and get hold of stamps and envelopes to share jokes in writing has probably saved the reputation of many teenagers as adults. :)
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Many of my youthful indiscretions were purged from memory in the cleansing fire of the MySpace collapse. Nothing like the utter clarity and certainty of a 14 year old who thinks he's smart.

This is something society is going to have to get used to. The abundance of social media and smartphone cameras means that many people's youthful follies will be documented forever. People of prominence are going to have to deal with video evidence of them being teenage ********, as must of us were at one point or another, well into their adulthood. Not sure what the solution is.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
This is something society is going to have to get used to. The abundance of social media and smartphone cameras means that many people's youthful follies will be documented forever. People of prominence are going to have to deal with video evidence of them being teenage ********, as must of us were at one point or another, well into their adulthood. Not sure what the solution is.
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At the moment, the preferred solution appears to be vilification for those who admit to and apologise for their past transgressions, and praise for those who not only remain unrepentant, but continue to escalate their level of dickishness. I'm not entirely sure what that solves, but it seems to be a pretty popular approach.

Dave
 
My take on a few facets of this:

1) I have a hard time seeing posting a random young do-gooder's teenage social media as in the particular public interest, especially if we're talking about two bad-taste tweets from 8 years ago. We don't need to put the character of EVERYBODY who is even vaguely in the public eye under a microscope. Maybe if he pivoted from this incident to run for public office. Otherwise, I don't particularly care if he knocked over a lquor store for meth money at 16.

2) I can't find the actual tweets by the reporter. My initial reaction is that they may not be as bad as depicted. "Totally going to marry a horse" sounds very much like mockery of dumb CRITICS of gay marriage and their slippery slope arguments. I can see the justification for shadenfruade in seeing a reporter held to his own standard, but that part at least sounds like a misrepresentation.
 
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Darat said:
No sympathy for him at all, I never felt I needed to.post racist comments and jokes on my Twitter account when I was 16!
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Congratulations for you. How many millions have you raised for children's charity by the way
 
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Every day, I thank gods I don't believe in that social media wasn't a thing when I was a teen. I would have been posting emo poetry, making bad jokes (though probably not racist ones), calling out people at school I didn't like, arguing my stupid positions with bravado, moaning about nihilism, and posting selfies of myself crying. Seriously, I am so glad. I was such a little twat, but I mostly get away with it because we weren't documenting everything then.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Many of my youthful indiscretions were purged from memory in the cleansing fire of the MySpace collapse. Nothing like the utter clarity and certainty of a 14 year old who thinks he's smart.

This is something society is going to have to get used to. The abundance of social media and smartphone cameras means that many people's youthful follies will be documented forever. People of prominence are going to have to deal with video evidence of them being teenage ********, as must of us were at one point or another, well into their adulthood. Not sure what the solution is.
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Oh yeah, I forgot about Myspace. I did have one of those very briefly (riddled with bad poetry and song lyrics, of course), but then my mom found out and deleted it while I was at school one day. I was so mad at the time, but now I want to go give her a hug. She knew it wasn't a good idea.
 
It's almost as if people can't be judged to be entirely good or entirely evil, but commit multiple acts of varying goodness or evil throughout their lives! Nah, that can't be it: every individual is either completely angelic or totally demonic.
 
isissxn said:
Oh yeah, I forgot about Myspace. I did have one of those very briefly (riddled with bad poetry and song lyrics, of course), but then my mom found out and deleted it while I was at school one day. I was so mad at the time, but now I want to go give her a hug. She knew it wasn't a good idea.
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What if they start researching old myspace pages.

40 something raises millions for charity, only to be outed as using someone else's picture on their Myspace page, and sending a sexy DM to Tia Tequila...
 
Drewbot said:
What if they start researching old myspace pages.

40 something raises millions for charity, only to be outed as using someone else's picture on their Myspace page, and sending a sexy DM to Tia Tequila...
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Anything from the heyday of MySpace is gone. Anything that wasn't saved elsewhere before the 2013 server migration was not preserved.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/business/myspace-user-data.html

My middle school proclamations of true wisdom are dust in the wind.
 
And what in the world is wrong with the reporter who thought something like this would be relevant? Is this supposed to be their big expose' that launches their career as an investigative journalist? And what was the editor who approved this thinking? 'Oh hellz ya, peeps luvs dirt! run it!'

Love to post the journalists' teenage dirty laundry in these things for perspective
 
Thermal said:
And what in the world is wrong with the reporter who thought something like this would be relevant? Is this supposed to be their big expose' that launches their career as an investigative journalist? And what was the editor who approved this thinking? 'Oh hellz ya, peeps luvs dirt! run it!'

Love to post the journalists' teenage dirty laundry in these things for perspective
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That does seem to be a bit of a journalistic pattern these days. Somebody does something good, or people are liking them - find something bad they did in the past to ruin it! Sometimes, that kind of info actually is relevant, but in cases like this, it seems more like cynicism on the journalist's part.

That's not to say the kid wasn't wrong. I have no idea who he is or if he's actually a racist or not. He could very well be; racists do good, charitable works sometimes too, and that fact doesn't cancel out their racism. I do also know that kids and teens can't always comprehend the true impact of jokes like that. I remember laughing at a joke about "how many Jews can you fit in a Volkswagen" when I was a young teen. I was laughing at the sheer audacity of it, the shock value. I, sadly, didn't even really think about the grim reality behind the joke at the time. I just enjoyed giggling at something that I knew would upset the mean old teacher if she overheard.

If someone made that same kind of joke to me now, I'd have to just walk away lest I smack them. I wouldn't find it funny at all.

Some (most?) people do grow up. That is still true, even in these troubled times.


ETA - Anyway, all that was just musing that this topic stirred up for me. I have no real opinion on the character of the people in this story. I don't have enough information.
 
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