Fake tweets, cancel culture and unexpectedly going viral on Twitter

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Last week, I did something a lot of people do every day: I tweeted out a joke. The joke in this case was a photo of a fake college English class essay I typed up about Tom and Jerry, then marked with frustrated red-pen notes and a D grade before tweeting it as though I were the professor at his wit’s end. To be clear, I’m not a college professor — I actually work in IT and am a comedian who performs in New York, presumably for other people who work in IT. But that didn’t stop thousands of people from seeing my tweet and assuming it was real.

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Monday, February 10, 5:39 p.m.: A major account claims what I did was deeply unethical. Considering that I didn’t realize people would believe this was real, I hadn’t realized that this would upset people. After he and several other big accounts realize it’s a spoof, a new debate emerges about whether or not jokes about professors are okay.

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Tuesday, February 11, 10:15 a.m.: My boss is on vacation, and my boss’s boss visits me in my office and asks me if I teach English. I tell him no, and he explains that he had to ask because people are calling him asking him to fire me. I apologize for the disturbance.

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Thursday, February 13, 10 a.m.: My boss arrives from his vacation not knowing anything about my viral tweet. He opens his computer to find 200 emails and calls me into his office. I tell him about my tweet and how it went viral in the past 72 hours. He suggests I not do that again.

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