Twitter closed 2022 with a happy ending.
Andrew Tate, a kind of machismo
influencer
, tried to provoke the activist Greta Thunberg with a tweet in which she asked him for an email to send him the complete list of her 33 cars.
Thunberg responded by providing an email address translatable as littlecockenergy@findlife.com, which sent Tate into a loop with a couple of lamentable responses.
Yes, please do enlighten me.
email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com https://t.co/V8geeVvEvg
— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) December 28, 2022
Tate's reaction to Thunberg's tweet isn't all that strange.
Anyone else with any dignity would have closed her account, changed her name and moved to New Zealand, but those who live in the attention economy don't need to “win the fight”;
it is enough for them to talk about them to get performance.
Tate doesn't care about being "dummy of the year", as the comedy duo Venga Monjas suggests, and he doesn't care that former NBA player Rex Chapman has recalled that "the magic of Twitter is that you can wake up not knowing who It's Andrew Tate and you go to sleep laughing at his little penis."
It is even possible that he does not care, although it hurts him, that he has been compared to Milhouse's father.
What really suited him was to attract the attention of as many people as possible to reach those who did not yet know him, thanks to the contagious power of indignation.
It's possible that 999 out of 1,000 people who landed on his Twitter account thought his
nunchuck masculinity
It seemed like a parody, but what counted was the thousand number, which can become a customer of your courses.
It's the Twitter version of trawling.
The magic of twitter is you can wake up not knowing who Andrew Tate is and go to sleep laughing at his tiny pecker.
— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) December 28, 2022
It seemed impossible, but in the photo finish the dumbest of the year ended up being Andrew Tate.
It has been a very close race 👏👏👏
— Come Nuns (@vengamonjas) December 30, 2022
pic.twitter.com/b0ByO4dHtq
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) December 28, 2022
What nobody expected was what happened next: just hours after this online confrontation, the Romanian police entered Tate's house on the outskirts of Bucharest, and arrested him for his alleged involvement in a human trafficking network, in addition to forcing women to record pornographic material.
He and three other suspects face sentences of several years in jail.
If tweeters were already happy with Thunberg's response, the needle on the
schadenfreudometer
went off scale after this arrest.
Above all, when the theory spread that the police found out that Tate was in Bucharest thanks to his response video to Thunberg, in which boxes from a pizza chain in the country are seen.
Before the police denied it, the activist had time to respond that "that's what happens when you don't recycle."
The tweet is already the seventh with the most
likes
in the history of the platform.
Tate's case is reminiscent of Milo Yiannopoulos, which many of the lucky ones will already have forgotten.
This blogger was one of the star columnists of the American extreme right during Trump's rise to power.
He gained notoriety thanks to headlines such as "Would you rather your daughter be a feminist or have her have cancer?"
The jokes made him laugh so much that he began to believe that everything he said was hilarious, until in an interview it occurred to him to defend pedophilia.
And that's when those who applauded him went on to ensure that they didn't know him at all.
Now he is almost forgotten and the "almost" is because in 2019 a somewhat disoriented Vox deputy quoted his words in the Madrid Assembly, and recently and for a few days he was director of Kanye West's 2024 presidential campaign.
These endings should not make us forget that Tate, Yiannopoulos and similar characters live to provoke and attract attention.
Before answering them on Twitter and giving them the notoriety they don't deserve, it's a good idea to count to ten or, directly, close the application for a while.
Especially since hardly anyone is as skilled as Greta Thunberg when it comes to making supposedly grown men cry with rage.