Your Guide to Starting and Following Twitter Beef

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the best at Twitter. We can’t all be as hilarious as Matt and George:

@Saverocity @pdxtraveltips @PFDigest Well, I have been folding for the past 36 months…So who knows? 🙂

— George (@FlyerTalkerinA2) January 30, 2016

That right there is classic Twitter banter – hilarious! Of course Matt has the advantage of having a cool accent, but we can’t all be born winners.

Anyway, if you were on Twitter last Wednesday, you know that all hell broke loose. Some people were discussing the best ways to get sent to jail while other people were discussing um…interesting stuff involving fingers. I was enjoying the show, but was thinking I need a review of all these new-fangled ways to attack people on Twitter. So, here are some good ways to start Twitter beefs and some ways to follow fights so you can sit courtside at all the action!

If you want to start beef…

There are some surefire methods of starting a Twitter fight. The most common is to just mention someone and say that they suck:

KK is weed fool. Reason's why your not wavy. Go bacc to Swish. https://t.co/7OT4xiQa5V

— Wizzlemania (@wizkhalifa) January 27, 2016

Kanye isn’t wavy! Shots fired! Now this wasn’t a direct mention but Kanye’s tweet was quoted so it works just fine. Also, you can see the bonus points here for misspelling a word – that lets people know you really DGAF, which adds to your street cred, which makes your words all the more liable to start something.

Another way you can start beef is via subtweet. When you subtweet someone, you make it obvious you are talking about them without actually mentioning them. It’s the equivalent of talking dirty behind their back. If they follow you, they’ll see it and know you’re “coming at their neck”, if they don’t, someone will still let them know.

Here’s a classic subtweet via Jim Harbaugh:

Do not be deceived. You will reap what you sow.

— Coach Harbaugh (@CoachJim4UM) January 4, 2016

If you’re not familiar, he got fired and then they fired his replacement (who did a pretty bad job) a year later. This tweet came immediately after that news broke. This subtweet gets bonus points because Harbaugh is dropping Biblical references on Twitter – wow.

A third, way more clever way of starting beef is to send a tweet out that was meant to just be a DM. Something like, “Shoot, that guy is just the gosh darn worstest” <deletes tweet ten seconds later>. That’s even dirtier than subtweeting and will ramp your fights up to 11 instantly.

A fourth way to get a fight going is via trolling. When you troll, you take an unpopular stance for the sole purpose of stirring the pot. Like, “Hey, ______ shouldn’t have the right to vote!” In fact, most trolls don’t even necessarily believe what they are saying. They are just being a something that rhymes with…dick.

But if you really want to get into beef on Twitter, do you know what the most important thing is? Make sure that you TAKE! EVERYTHING! PERSONALLY! Twitter is an amazing place for extended discourse and discussion on complicated and nuanced topics, but it gets even better when you are TAKING! IT! PERSONALLY! (old TWoP reference). It’s the best way to blow things out of proportion.

If you want to follow along…

Let’s say you’re not super confrontational, but you just want to get your popcorn ready. The best way to do that is to create a new column in Tweetdeck following whatever user all the beef is centering around. That way you’ll see all their mentions and everything they say without having to navigate through all the other random stuff going on on Twitter.

I used Kenny as an example here because you can give him his own column and learn a ton of stuff – though who knows maybe he will start beef sometime soon!

One suggest I have for you fighters out there, if you can spare the characters, give your beef some sort of hashtag. That way we can follow along way more easily! Like #KK or #wavy or #jail.

BTW, you know your beef has hit it big when you start trending. That’s big time.

One serious note…

So I was listening to sports radio today, and the subject of Cam Newton’s dancing came up. For those who don’t know, he’s a NFL quarterback who does some fairly elaborate dances when he scores a touchdown – this rubs some people the wrong way. The host was basically saying, “I don’t like when Aaron Rodgers does the discount double check, and I don’t like when Cam dances. It’s not because he’s black.” Oh yeah, Cam’s black, btw.

Anyway, I take the host at his word that his annoyance is not racially motivated. However, the internet is an ugly place, and just because this host’s annoyance isn’t racially motivated doesn’t mean that some of the people who share the same opinion aren’t racially motivated to feel that way, at least in some part.

So I personally try to be careful not to give fuel to people who will just use it to hate further, even if I think my opinion is as objective as possible. Bigots thrive on people agreeing with them, whether they agree for the same reasons or not. Dat internet…sigh.

Final Thoughts

So…who’s starting the next Twitter fight? It could be you!