Update, 9:51pm Pacific Time, 1/15/2011: Mandela’s death notice is gone, but “RIP Justin Bieber” is still trending more than nine hours later — clearly, these things take on a life of their own.
Currently trending on Twitter is the term #RIP Nelson Mandela, which — if it wasn’t a Twitter hoax — would mean the world was uniting to honor a fallen hero. Except it’s not touching, because the 92-year-old Mandela isn’t dead and Twitter is, in my estimation, increasingly besieged by douchebags.
Also not dead, today, is “Justin Bieber,” whose RIP notice seems to have shown up shortly after I first noticed Mandela’s, possibly in response to it. It seems to have shot more quickly up the ranks than Mandela’s, interestingly. There was also a counterattack by Bieber Lovers, the #appreciatebieber tag. That’ll show ’em, kids! Keenen Ivory Wayans, meanwhile, is still alive, as far as I know.
Incedentally, it took the Ghana News to tip me off to the fact that Nelson Mandela was still alive, which of course I suspected before I even checked.
Has this now become a trend? A trend about the trending of trending? A morbid fascination with getting other people to do something, just to see if you can? What happened to good old-fashioned fun that couldn’t possibly hurt anybody, like tipping over port-a-potties?
Wouldn’t these idiots rather be writing outraged blog posts about how Central Asian villages need clean water and medical supplies, or something?
I wonder if the whole Twitter death hoax thing has, maybe, you know, jumped the shark. You think?