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InternetNovember 4, 2022

The top 10 New Zealand tweets of all time

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Twitter has been bought by Elon Musk. To mark the occasion, here’s 10 good tweets.

Additional reporting by Alex Casey and Anna Rawhiti-Connell

Twitter is a cursed platform. Everyone knows this, most of all the people who spend the most time on it. A list of the worst New Zealand tweets of all time would be too long even for me. But the official worst New Zealand tweet, for those curious, was posted by the police, and it’s this:

So that’s the worst one. But as we look into a Musk-owned Twitter future, let’s celebrate the rare rays of sunshine in the discourse abyss. The tweets where everyone was united either in love, laughter or pointless outrage. These are the 10 best New Zealand tweets of all time.

10. John Campbell’s dating advice

John J. Campbell began his career as Twitter’s hardened aunt with a heart of gold in 2018. After producer and artist Lucy Zee tweeted that a guy she was seeing pronounced the word “necklace” as “neck lace”, Campbell unleashed two mighty words on the New Zealand Twitter community. “Drop him,” he wrote.

For a while it was like Campbell had your back. A voice from on high with no tolerance for bullshit and genuine concern for his weird little community. A famous face with a list of televisual achievements in his bio, enthusiastically bantering with people who had “entitled nobody” in theirs.  Committing to the bit, Campbell stamped “Drop him” around Twitter like an old timer who opens his mouth to dispense ancient wisdom or spit chewing tobacco to the ground once a year. 

In January 2020, Piers Morgan shared a screenshot of a DM he’d received from Meghan Markle in 2015, wounded that she was no longer a fan of his after he called her a “selfish social climber”. Campbell rode again. Retweeting Morgan’s tweet, he dispensed his advice to Markle with cut-throat precision: “Drop him”.

9. ‘The gaffe man’

This tweet did not get 22.5k likes in 2012, that’s for certain. Ten years ago, Jacinda Ardern was merely a list MP in Auckland with an inoffensive social media presence. When Boris Johnson entered the leadership conversation in the UK, Ardern posted an opinion voiced by many, many others. “When I lived in London he was known as the gaffe man!” A fine and middling tweet in 2012.

Seven years later on July 24, 2019, Ardern was now prime minister and far less active on Twitter. That day, Johnson became prime minister of the UK and up popped Ardern’s tweet from the archives. A perfect example of why no one in politics should ever tweet.

8. Milk in the pantry

This is one for the tragics. Twitter is a place where people can be minor celebrities while not being publicly known in any other part of their life. @trillyelliot is one of those people. An Auckland user from way back, Trilly posted funny things and occasionally trolled politicians and journalists taking themselves too seriously.

On the other side of Twitter was the @PeopleofNZ account, a hyper earnest community-driven project where every week a random New Zealander took control of the account and shared what they were doing in their little corner of Aotearoa. Lovely, fine, often a bit boring. In April of 2017, Trilly took over the PeopleofNZ account and immediately started a war. Beginning with a poll asking if milk should be stored in the fridge, Trilly went on a crusade, insisting to earnest followers that milk belongs in the pantry. At least 20 avid followers of PeopleofNZ ended up blocking his personal account because of it. One user announced the decision and the reason: “So @PeopleofNZ this week is a block/mute. Asked me how I know ‘so much about science’ when I explained how milk goes bad out of the fridge.”

It’s actually quite hard to explain how mad everyone got over it, proving the Milk Saga of 2017 to be the greatest troll in New Zealand Twitter history.

7. Gerry Brownlee’s eight-lane highway

Guy Montgomery’s brief stint as a Gerry Brownlee parody account is the exception that proves the rule that all parody accounts are bad. The context, which you’ll be forgiven for not remembering, was a statement from the director general of health Ashley Bloomfield warning New Zealanders that a second wave of Covid was inevitable. Brownlee took issue with that and put out his own statement just asking questions. “What do these guys know that they are not telling us?” he wondered.

In response, Montgomery spent three days impersonating Brownlee and tweeting all sorts of nonsense. But this one, which many readers thought was genuinely coming (ha) from National’s transport spokesperson, is poetry.

6. Ahhh…it’s all good

Before she was an award-winning author of a bestselling and hilarious book (Greta & Valdin), Rebecca K Reilly was just another tweeter. This tweet is exceptional for being so specific and yet so immediately recognisable to not just all New Zealanders but also anybody who has ever met a New Zealander. Restart the flag referendum because this tweet is a picture of patriotism.

5. Rihanna’s forehead = too big

A tweet so visceral, so powerful that you can somehow see, smell and taste it. Delivered in lower case urgency with little punctuation aside from the essential all-action asterisks, Holden’s portrait of a Sad Man Online became an instant classic. Given that this tweet happened in 2015, before MeToo and incel culture entered the conversation and Trump was elected president, it’s interesting to think where Dorito Dust Dude would have ended up. In prison after storming the Capitol? Almost certainly.

4. Keith Quinn rates dancing

Not every great tweet is a viral hit. Sometimes the best tweet get five retweets and 12 likes (one of which is from the official Spinoff account). Sometimes the fourth best New Zealand tweet ever is an accidental poem by venerable sports broadcaster Keith Quinn.

This is a poem in three parts, and each is more surprising and thrilling than the last. It starts by addressing “this ‘Running Man’ video fuss”. It’s surprising to imagine someone like Keith Quinn, whose public persona exists almost exclusively within the twin realms of rugby and life insurance ads, being aware of and engaging with a viral dance trend. The second part builds suspense: “The only thing I know is to agree with…” What’s the last thing you expect to read next? “The great GrantNisbett” would have to be up there. But all this is mere set-up for the kicker, as Quinn presents us with his fellow rugby commentator’s perfect, devastating three-word critique of an entire artform, something he apparently “has always said” (how often does this come up?!): “Dancing is irrelevant.”

3. Amanda Palmer walks into a coffee shop

There’s a decent case for this to be number one, despite not even being written by a New Zealander because it represents the funniest and weirdest and cringest elements of both online New Zealand and Amanda Palmer. Palmer claimed that on the day Joe Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, New Zealanders at her local Havelock North cafe applauded her when she walked in.

New Zealanders online (and not in the cafe) hated this tweet more than perhaps any other. The shared shame of being presented as a nation that spontaneously applauds in public terrified us and cracked our desperately-projected easygoing veneer. Thankfully, Hayden Donnell investigated her claims in what should have been an award-winning piece of journalism but instead is just another article on thespinoff.co.nz.

2. Tweets on Winston Peters NZ politician

I simply cannot imagine a world where Winston Peters created a Twitter account and didn’t immediately search his own name. It’s the combination of him being extremely powerful throughout the 2017 election campaign and completely powerless in the face of modern technology.

We’ve all accidentally typed search terms into a status bar, but even as search terms, you cannot get more poetic than “Tweets on Winston Peters NZ politician”. I hope he found what he was looking for.

1. Hera Lindsay Bird’s piss country

There was no contest here. A perfect tweet, and one that no longer exists in its original form. Such a good tweet that fellow good tweeter Ashleigh Young perfectly celebrated its power earlier this year. There’s nothing more for me to add, so here’s an excerpt from Young’s tribute:

“The moment I always return to is the crescendo of ‘piss country’. It’s that word ‘piss’ – it’s so unexpected, almost sweet. Like all great endings it shines a new light back through the tweet: suddenly this place is not even solid, it is just piss.”

‘Love The Spinoff? Its future depends on your support. Become a member today.’
Madeleine Chapman
— Editor
Keep going!
Emu content (Image: Tina Tiller)
Emu content (Image: Tina Tiller)

InternetNovember 1, 2022

Is Emmanuel the emu good or bad? The whole EmuTok controversy, explained

Emu content (Image: Tina Tiller)
Emu content (Image: Tina Tiller)

A seemingly innocuous corner of TikTok where people post videos of emus is the epicentre of the latest niche internet drama. Here’s everything you need to know.

This story was first published on the author’s newsletter, Emily Writes Weekly.

While I’m not a fan of emus, I am a fan of niche internet drama. So with that in mind, after requests following my last post, here’s my breakdown of the emu content controversy.

OK wait, what is EmuTok?

EmuTok is basically the emu realm of TikTok. Endless videos of emus in hobby and rescue farms – mostly charging at their owners, because that’s what female emus do.

Just who are these famous emus?

Emmanuel is the “main” emu at Knuckle Bump Farms in south Florida. Emmanuel’s owner is Taylor. Together they have 2.4 million followers. Other featured emus from the farm are Ellen, Eliza, Elliot, and Emily.

Karen is an emu at Useless Farm in Kingston, Ontario. Karen’s owner is Amanda. Together they have five million followers. Less popular is Stanley, another emu who lacks the blinding charisma of Karen. He also lives on Useless Farm.

Why are people talking about this?

Because, basically, there’s been an outbreak of avian influenza, aka bird flu, at Knuckle Bump Farms and Emmanuel got sick. According to owner Taylor Blake, more than 50 birds on her farm died in three days. These included other emus – namely, Emily, Eliza and Elliot.

Taylor posted videos of herself lying next to Emmanuel and kissing him on the beak. If you immediately thought “why on God’s green Earth would anyone kiss an emu with fucking bird flu” well, you’re not alone my friend. Science Twitter, particularly virologists and veterinarians, really lost their shit on this one and who could blame them.

A virologist and research scientist from the Vaccine and Infection Disease Organization in Canada said what everyone was thinking: “If your emu (or any bird) has avian influenza, do not kiss it. Do not cuddle with it. Do not touch it. Bird flu is extremely dangerous to humans and other animals.”

Like others, this scientist said Emmanuel should be euthanised.

So did Emmanuel get euthanised?

No. Taylor responded to the backlash by saying she cuddled him with no protection because Emmanuel “freaks” when he sees a mask. It turns out that not only does Emmanuel not know that he’s a viral star on TikTok, he also doesn’t know the importance of masking up.

So she kept on snuggling that emu. And then oh, how the tables turn, in that it turns out Emmanuel didn’t ever even have bird flu.

On October 23 Taylor tweeted: “Emmanuel Todd Lopez tested negative for Avian Influenza at two separate labs, swab, fecal, and blood. He does not have the virus, and is not actively shedding the virus”.

So wait, why was the emu so sick then?

Good question. Despite saying “God is Good” and that’s why Emmanuel is not bird flu positive… It turns out maybe he was just anxious the whole time?

“We believe this all stemmed from stress. Emus are highly susceptible to stress. He was incredibly overwhelmed by the state coming in and euthanising our flock.” Taylor tweeted.

Is it possible Emmanuel the emu was stressed because his owner was Milkshake Ducked?

So, just to make sure we’re at the same place here: being Milkshake Ducked is when a person who is beloved on social media is quickly revealed to be racist or a Nazi or just plain problematic. The phenomenon takes its name from this all-time great tweet:

Had you been mixing up Taylor from Knuckle Bump Farms with Amanda from Useless Farms? Don’t worry, now you can remember that one is “the Racist Emu Lady” and one… isn’t.

As is the way of the internet, it was recently revealed that Taylor had a bunch of racist tweets out in the world before her rebrand as an emu enthusiast on TikTok. She also did that “pretending to be racist to satirise racism” thing, playing a woman named Karen (of course), which rarely works out in the way white TikTok comedians think it will. This all inevitably led to an online discussion (including this long thread) about Taylor, white lesbians and racism.

‘Love The Spinoff? Its future depends on your support. Become a member today.’
Madeleine Chapman
— Editor

OK but what about the other Karen – the emu from Canada?

That emu is fine. And is only mentioned as an antidote to “the Racist Emu Lady” as, incredibly, her owner has no skeletons in her closet as of publication time.

I just wish beloved wild life enthusiast and eternal-teen Bindi Irwin had something to do with this.

Well, it’s your lucky day, because she does. When it was thought Emmanuel had bird flu, Taylor and her followers bombarded Bindi with requests to help. Even though Bindi lives in a country called Australia which is not in the United States.

Taylor tweeted Bindi: “I have been a fan of your family for as long as I can remember, I am reaching out to you in total desperation right now. I need help saving my emu, Emmanuel.”

Bindi replied that though the Irwin/Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital has treated over 100,000 animals including emus, they have never treated an emu “with this particular disease”.

She rather sensibly added: “We will need to rely on our fellow animal experts with more experience with this avian flu”. But it was too late. Emmanuel’s fans were pissed that she wouldn’t help.

In a now deleted tweet, one member of the Church of Emmanuel and Parasocial Relationships with Emus said: “What a pathetic, useless reply. Zero effort to help when you’re in a supposedly unique position to use your influence and contacts to actually help her. Thoughts and prayers are cheap. You are unimpressive and that’s being polite.”

I am so tired. I am so very tired of this world.

Absolutely fair but not a question.

So what now?

I imagine this whole brouhaha will ignite a debate on whether people should keep emus as pets and use wild animals as ways to gain popularity on social media. Or maybe it will highlight the dangers of avian flu.

Or maybe there will be no further debate and people will choose which emu side they’re on and one day there will be a new emu influencer, and we will follow her and then she will be Milkshake Ducked and it will continue on in an endless cycle until the planet dies.

What does Emmanuel say about that?

Nothing. He’s an emu.

This story was first published on the author’s newsletter, Emily Writes Weekly.


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