Everything You Read on the Internet Is True
“It’s happening. Entire team of data engineers let go. These are two of them,” CNBC reporter Deirdra Bosa tweeted Friday morning from outside Twitter HQ, covering Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform.
CNBC and Bloomberg filmed interviews with the two men, named Ligma and Johnson. Waving around a copy of Michelle Obama’s memoir, Ligma solemnly told reporters, “I’m a big fan of clean energy, climate change, even free speech too.” Meanwhile, Johnson cut his interview short, explaining he had “to go touch base with my wife and my husband.”
The prank was a success; the reporters ran with the story. In no time, everyone on Twitter was joking about the tragic firing of Ligma-Johnson. On my way to the bar, I made a joke tweet about my own firing, intentionally making my colleagues’ names more deranged sounding with each tweet in the thread.
“Journalists - my name is Amanda Hugnkis, and today I was fired by Elon Musk himself at Twitter HQ. Willing to talk on the record. DMs are open.” A couple people seemed to believe me, so I quickly added, “my colleague Ben Dover has informed me he is also willing to talk.” When a right leaning account said he was glad Elon was cleaning house, I quote tweeted him with a desperate plea: “Jessie please be serious this is an emergency. My work husband, I.P. Freely, isn’t going to be able to feed his children.”
I put my phone in my purse, walked into the bar, and didn’t look at Twitter for the next 9 hours. When I checked my phone at 3:30am, my inbox was full of media requests, and my notifications were full of self-satisfied right wingers — and it didn’t stop for days, even after I asked for an attorney to help me file a BOFA lawsuit against Elon (I had at least 4 people reach out to me about representation!).
Hello Amanda, I Produce the 11 o’clock news for @8NewsNow out of Las Vegas. I am 100% down to coordinate an interview if you’re comfortable sharing what has happened in the transition of Musk gaining control of Twitter and what the last few months have been like inside the company.
I’m a reporter for INC magazine. Did you receive severance? If so how much? (Weeks of pay, I don’t need dollar amounts.) What was your job? Thanks so much!
Hi Amanda, I'm sorry to hear about the job loss. I can't imagine how unsettling that is. If you're interested in working with a local news journalist to tell your story, let me know. (From KRON4, The Bay Area's Local News Station)
Hi I’m from Fox 5 San Diego we’d love to get a zoom interview when you are free. We are a “news nation” affiliate not Fox News Corps. Just saying we aren’t right wing we are just regular news.
Hi Amanda. I am a journalist in the Seattle area. I would love to invite you into my weekly radio show HeartBeat radio. Diverse community broadcasting. Our community is intrigued by what’s happening. Can i speak with you about this?
Hi Amanda, sorry this happened. I’d love to pitch this to ELLE who I wrote for regularly. Can I get some details to send them? Thank you!
Hello!! I hope you're okay and I'm so sorry to hear of your layoff. I'm a reporter at Business Insider and I would love to speak to you.
Guys, what the fuck — how did you not learn your lesson? My joke tweet only existed because journalists had fallen for Ligma Johnson! Even if I.P. Freely wasn’t enough to get you, my real name is in my Twitter header photo!
My Twitter bio sends you to my Linktree, where my real name is listed again. Top billing in the “All About Me” section is a Mother Jones profile of me, linked under the title “Who Am I, Anyway?” I use the same profile image across Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, and my city is listed as Washington, DC on all platforms (DC is, notably, several thousand miles away from Twitter HQ).
It would take at most two minutes to look at my profile and see it appears unlikely I work for Twitter.
While I expect more due diligence from journalists than I do from the average person, I was still pretty shocked by the thousands of people that did not get the joke. 90% of them were right wingers who were very eager to tell me how glad they were Elon had sacked me.
You deserved to be fired and i hope your life is destroyed because of it. Think of all the harm you have caused
Hi! I just wanted to tell you that I’m glad to see you go. You’re part of the reason our country is falling apart and I’m glad that you’ve got what you had coming.
Lay down with dogs...
Twitter did me wrong so why should I care?
You'll just get another job with another evil company
Love how women only open their DMs when they need something LOL bye
umm Trump won, Democrats are pure evil and have a wonderful day bitch
You were fired by Twitter. Sorry. But I’m guessing you are a liberal whacko that believes in suspending free speech for anyone that disagrees with the anti American corrupt left and state run media. If so, you getting fired was ok.
Go fuck yourself you liberal piece of shit.
No one cares about ur communist ass. Go to China you can wear mask and snitch on ur fellow citizens. Ull love it
You say you are willing to talk, talk about what? The corruption within twitter, and the political bias you used against conservatives. Twitter is a privately owned company and your employment is at the pleasure of Elon Musk, apparently his is not pleased with your performance! As he fired your worthless ass. Good for him… I hope your removal from a government run agency results in your inability to to obtain future employment. You worthless communist bitch!
People doubled down, even when someone insisted they were an attorney at Koch Taynt & Balz LPP, taking on my BOFA case.
Maybe the journalists were just in a rush to be the first to get the interview (though as someone who has actually been the person a bunch of journalists wanted to interview, I can promise you I selected the reporter I talked to based on who they were, not how quickly they DMed me). Maybe the laypeople were just so consumed by hate they couldn’t see the joke right in front of them. But the amount of people who fell for it is fairly depressing. Musk has decided to remove traditional verification and turn it into a pay to display vanity badge, a move that will make it easier to make fake accounts for journalists, researchers, and county/city governments departments. The verification process helps curtail at least some rage bait, fake news, and disinformation — and considering how much of it still exists on the platform, removing one of the most basic guardrails makes no sense.
Here’s to hoping our wild west Twitter future is full of Jaboukies making quality jokes, and not one full of Groypers with checks spreading lies.
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Amanda Hugnkis is such an old gag, I can’t believe anyone wouldn’t recognise it...anyway hope you and your husband I.P. Freely are doing well.
This is the funniest thing I have ever seen
look at this world and tell me God isn't a hack writer for the most over-the-top satire in the universe, you can't