Twitter Users Stand with Glenn Greenwald: Ten Funniest Tweets from #GGscandals
As some news outlets began to expose details of journalist Glenn Greenwald’s personal life this week, social media users fought back with a clever and hilarious campaign designed to smear the smearmeisters. The campaign revolves around the Twitter hashtag #GGscandals, which had appeared in more than 1,500 Tweets by this morning. The tweets accuse Greenwald of a seemingly endless litany of absurd misdeeds, from drinking milk straight from the bottle to “letting the dogs out.”
Is the story about the personal lives of Greenwald and Snowden? Or is it about the privacy of the American people and the actions of the NSA?
Because many of these minor infractions are things most of us have done at some point, the hashtag’s ultimate message seems to be “Glenn Greenwald is one of us.”
The campaign is a wry riposte to media efforts to attack the reputations of those involved in the leaking of National Security Agency documents. Soon after the NSA story broke earlier this month, the press stepped in to smear leaker Edward Snowden. Joe Scarborough of Fox News called him a “weasel,” Jeffrey Toobin at the New Yorker called him “,” while Politico reported that he “.”
More recently, the spotlight has been turned on Greenwald, the lawyer and columnist at The Guardian who broke the story. Yesterday morning, the New York Daily News detailing how, a decade earlier, Greenwald had been part owner of a company that had a pornographer as a client. In a blog posted the same day, Greenwald attempted to preempt such stories and described receiving emails and phone calls from reporters investigating about other aspects of his past.
“Just today,” Greenwald wrote, “a New York Times reporter emailed me to ask about the IRS back payments. And the reporter from the Daily News sent another email asking about a student loan judgment which was in default over a decade ago and is now covered by a payment plan agreement.”
Is the story about the personal lives of Greenwald and Snowden? Or is it about the privacy of the American people and the actions of the NSA?
Read on for some of our favorite Tweets using the #GGscandals hashtag:
Glenn Greenwald convinced Darth Vader to add a thermal exhaust port to the Death Star.
— Arun Gupta (@arunindy)
Guardian colleagues tired of describing Dan Brown as “our greatest living novelist”
— Tom Jackson (@jacksontom)
Glenn Greenwald leaves the toilet seat up. #
— Madhouse Muse (@MadhouseMuse)
Glenn Greenwald once saw someone running towards the elevator he was on, but let it close anyway.
— Richard Jackson (@Rickymtj)
Glenn Greenwald accepts Apple iTunes agreements without reading them
— Brian Septon (@BrianSepton)
Glenn Greenwald thinks he can jump to the front of the line at Starbucks just because he’s the top trending term on Twitter
— Ra (@Ra__)
Glenn Greenwald brings 16 items into the express checkout lane.
— Lena (@lenaqp)
Glen Greenwald bites the heads off the gummy bears first.
— revolutioncalling (@im1013)
Glenn Greenwald thinks he’s one of the few that “really gets” David Lynch.
— Kevin Dooley (@kevindooleyirl)
Glenn Greenwald asks for your number, but never calls
— T_R_A_V_I_S (@Trivs)
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