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When Twitter Q&As Backfire Disastrously

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Gizmodo International
When Twitter Q&As Backfire Disastrously

This was not a good week on social media for writer E.L. James of Fifty Shades of Grey and would-be US Presidential candidate Governor Bobby Jindal. Both took to Twitter to answer fans’ questions. But both are controversial figures, and the majority of tweets were delightful take-downs that burned so good.

First up: E.L. James. The author is loathed by vocal segments of The Internet; James haters are legion. You can hate her for her painfully bad writing, which wouldn’t fly in a freshman comp class. You can hate her for the fact that Fifty Shades began as fanfiction of Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight. Or you can hate James for inaccurately depicting BDSM and for framing the abusive relationship between the two protagonists as the height of romance. Take your pick! Twitter users on #AskELJames certainly did.

You should check out the hashtag, which has provided days of endless entertainment and is still going long after James’ PR team cherry-picked some softball questions to answer.

Some James fans were upset about the ridicule sent in the author’s direction. I think she’s more than a fair target — the majority of Tweets criticised James’ writing style and characterizations, which are valid subjects for a writer who has earned upwards of $US90 million from her work. Debates over the way Fifty Shades portrays the relationship between clueless, virginal Ana Steele and the brooding, stalker-y billionaire Christian Grey have swirled in online communities for ages, gaining strength again this year when the Fifty Shades film came out. Since James’ latest book Grey retells the story through Christian’s eyes, long-simmering concerns found a new outlet in the Q&A.

You can read more about “50 shades of abuse” here (I’ve also written about the disturbing themes in Twilight, upon which Fifty Shades was originally based). This is an instance where Twitter mobs are raising awareness through irony rather than getting out their pitchforks for no reason.

A similar movement of derision to expose hypocrisy was in action for Bobby Jindal’s Q&A disaster. It appears that Jindal’s PR people missed the James kerfluffle, because on Tuesday they asked Twitter to leave town hall questions for the Governor of Louisiana under the hashtag #AskBobby. Peruse Gawker’s amazing tag for all the Jindal coverage you can shake a Bible at.

Jindal is widely known for his anti-science views and mixing a hardline Christian rhetoric into politics; both have earned him a history of internet scorn. He is fiercely opposed to reproductive rights, marriage equality, and immigration reform, but he believes in demonic possession and exorcisms. Unsurprisingly, #AskBobby did not go as planned.

We hope the answer to that is never. This material is gold, and exactly what Twitter was made for. While it is unlikely that either James or Jindal had to sift through the negative Tweets themselves, many a headline has since been generated about the real questions people wish they would answer.

In these cases, the sub-narrative created by Twitter users became the dominant reported story — with attempts at self-promotion washed away in a wave of truth-telling and 140-character-shots fired.

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