2018 Recap: Going Viral for Swift

28 Dec
2018

October is broken up into parts, because WOW I packed a lot in. Hold on, people.

Melinda Ann and I had a second Taylor Swift show to attend, this time in Dallas. As I mentioned before, we bought tickets a whole 11 months prior to this show, and the ticket buying process was so stressful (for what turned out to be the biggest grossing tour of the year thankyouverymuch) that when I saw some floor seats that did not cost my monthly car payment, I grabbed them. When we got to the stadium and found our spot, however…we realized we were RIGHT ALONG the walkway that Taylor uses to get from one small stage to another. She was gonna walk right past us, and walk right by she did. I almost fainted. She glows like fairies lighting up a glitter factory…or something.

So that show was great and we once again sang and screamed and cried and laughed. I love that kind of concert roller coaster.

The following Monday, still jazzed on the whole Taylor Experience, I was eating lunch at home and checking Twitter, as I do, and noticed that Mike Huckabee had said something lame in regards to Taylor’s (very welcome) social media reminder to vote in the November midterms. Whilst chewing, I composed an annoyed tweet at Huckabee. After getting up for a glass of water, I sat down and added one more tweet. I continued about my business.

Then I looked down at my phone about 20 minutes later and…oh. Oh no. Notifications were going CRAZY. People were liking and retweeting. I had never gone viral before but I knew this was maybe something like…going viral. I just sat there and watched as reply after reply came in, and the like count on the posts grew by 50 at a time.

It was kinda cool. Then I realized there are ton of literally insane people on the internet, and that a LOT of them live on Twitter. I started freaking out a little bit.

Then I got tagged in a post from a friend who said, “I saw you on the Huffington Post!”

What now?

I guess the tweetstorm that came at Huckabee got enough attention to be featured in the media, and my tweets were right there in the thick of it. I was simultaneously proud and terrified.

The good news is, while there were some haters, I quickly learned to block them and that seemed to work. Nothing got too out of hand, well, except for some lovely notes like this:

Which were balanced out by more like this:

Thanks, guy named Dave. The internet is a really wild, potentially terrible place. Humanity is wild and potentially terrible, too…but there were a lot of notes of support and mostly, the response was one of mirth and amusement. As I told my friends, IT GOES TO SHOW that my first taste of going viral online would be because I was defending T-Swift.

In the end, it was a mild brush with virality. I got about 2,000 likes on each tweet, and the fervor died down in about three days. Everything is back to normal, and while it was stressful, I’ll have T-Swift’s back any day. ANY. DAY.

Amen. And this was just the first week of the month….

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