The Social Media Activities Of 15 Year Olds Are Not Worth Your Attention

It was inevitable in the aftermath of the Michigan State game: websites looking for #content tell their unpaid intern to type in Blake O'Neill's twitter handle and report back with all the bad things they find there. Copy and paste and you have #viral #content for your crapsite.

That's right! It's a screenshot of a screenshot tweet! Original did not black out usernames FWIW.

Once the crapsites have aggregated their #content, larger players step in to say the most blindingly obvious things possible: that is bad. Don't do that. Something something society. It's obvious that the larger players don't do much more than read the sensationalized headlines thrown out without considering whether they are justified.

Arguing with crapsite proprietors is fruitless since they have found out they have no ability to acquire viewership through doing good work. But I would like to emphasize that I went through every account on both of those posts (neither of which contains a death threat, by the way) in an effort to see if there was something these twitter users have in common. Aside from one Sorry For Partying type named Mitch* who seems to be a current student and a random, lonely Patriots fan with a sad attempt at facial hair, this is what they look like.

it goes without saying but don't harass these children

They are literally children. The third and fourth are the "death threat" issuers**. They are about as dangerous as an egg salad sandwich. They are approximately 15. They spend 90% of every day thinking about how great it will be when they get to put their hand up a girl's shirt. They represent nothing other than the fact that a healthy slice of teenage boys don't know how to act. I and much of the readership will know this from personal experience. We were fortunate to not have twitter.

Scolding these kids is pointless. They will learn, and then there will be a new generation of them writing the same stuff on FaceSnaps 2030. Extrapolating anything about any fanbase from the portion of it that has a phone but not a driver's license is equally pointless. If you're going to report on it you should know that your next article should be about what Becky told Morgan in the locker room about McKinley.

We now have "global access to the written opinions of morons." It sucks for Blake O'Neill that Scott Tenorman got all up in his mentions, but it's worse that #content farms continually try to spin the hormonal excesses of the nation's youth into pageviews. Twitter should seek to implement a technological fix for this kind of pile-on. Until they do the snap decisions of children should be ignored by people who don't know them.

Go ahead and be proud of the fact that your reject these notions if you have such low expectations of yourself. Be proud of the fact that you think cancer sucks, too, while you're at it. It's about as useful an activity. One day we will beat twitter and cancer by scowling about them on the internet. You just wait.

*[You suck, Mitch.]

**[It should be noted again that neither of those tweets is any kind of threat. As far as terrible things said to people in the aftermath of Bad Sports Event go if that's the best you can come up with things are going pretty well.]