Apologies for sharing social media criticism rather than something more useful, but there are a couple points I thought were interesting: [...] I'll just add that lots of tweets look like orphan...
Apologies for sharing social media criticism rather than something more useful, but there are a couple points I thought were interesting:
If you’ve been on Twitter long enough, you’ll recognise that there is sometimes a feeling of anticipation: people have a reactive take ready to go and are just waiting for someone to express the opinion they are primed to denounce. [...] Some of these takes are driven by a belief that the condemned opinion is widely held, but that your opponents are generally too wily to say it out loud. So when someone does voice it, no matter who they are . . . charge!
[...]
Unfortunately, some commentators were so primed for someone white and high-profile to put their foot in it that their takes went off prematurely at the first sign someone had. Even better—Prince William! The foe of beloved Meghan Markle! He is exactly the kind of guy to say something thoughtless and racist!
Within hours, though, the record had been corrected to include what Prince William actually said [...]
It is hard not to see the Prince William incident as an example of a readymade reaction in search of a grievance: a pigeonhole had formed, to misquote Tim Minchin, and by god a pigeon would be found to fill it.
To anyone who wasn’t on Twitter for the hour in which all this went down, the sequence of events must have been bewildering. All those ants, marching in a spiral.
I’ve been trying to think of a term for this phenomenon, where the reaction is disproportionate to the original provocation (or even seems to precede it). I’ve settled on orphan take. An orphan take is an opinion expressed in backlash to a marginal, nebulous or anticipated opposing view. If you see angry tweets or opeds about the horror of a viewpoint you’ve never seen expressed in the wild, that’s an orphan take.
I'll just add that lots of tweets look like orphan takes to me (whether they are or not) because I'm enough out of touch that I didn't see what they're reacting to.
Also:
There is no better enemy to take on, if you want to make yourself seem righteous but you are also quite lazy, than one which is both vast and nameless. Otherwise it becomes clear that if you draw away the curtain, Wizard of Oz-style, you are having an argument with one guy from Cleethorpes, or a professional shitposter—one of those people who only really exists on Twitter.
Apologies for sharing social media criticism rather than something more useful, but there are a couple points I thought were interesting:
[...]
I'll just add that lots of tweets look like orphan takes to me (whether they are or not) because I'm enough out of touch that I didn't see what they're reacting to.
Also: