Wednesday, May 29, 2024
Elder of Ziyon
The intended point was that if the "State of Palestine" is represented by a watermelon, it would not be the type of watermelon anyone would enjoy. It would be a corrupt, terror supporting, misogynist, gay bashing, antisemitic dictatorship and probably an Islamist fundamentalist ally of Iran. I wanted to create an unappealing watermelon picture.
But for some reason, anti-Zionists went crazy, convinced that the seeds represented Palestinian children that I was advocating to murder. Some went much further, looking at the history of seedless watermelon breeding and tying it to racism. The amount of analysis in some responses took more time than I did in creating the meme to begin with.
That insane interpretation made this tweet the most popular thing I have ever posted, by far. It gathered over ten million impressions, with thousands of angry responses.
Yes, more people were exposed to this failed watermelon meme than the number of people who live in Israel altogether.
Now that the furor has died down, I have a couple of thoughts.
While the meme itself was not an extreme opinion by any measure, people's antisemitic assumption that it called for genocide drove its going massively viral. Which means that the reverse is true: extreme opinions and hate generally tend to attract more attention than the types of more cerebral, thoughtful and fact-filled posts I try to create. Even my usual cartoons and memes are meant to highlight irony and hypocrisy to make people think,, not to bash people over the head with blunt messages.
I can see how the desire to get posts to go viral can prompt people to post extreme opinions, and they get rewarded for doing so. If I accepted ads on X, I would have made a tidy sum of money from that post alone. (I typically get about 2 million impressions a month.)
When money, fame or egos are involved, objectivity suffers. This applies to even the most prestigious newspapers. Whether they are conscious of it or not, the choice of stories to cover and the wording in the stories, whether in a newspaper or TV show or social media post, affects the amount of attention one gets, and attention for most people leads to either a psychic or monetary reward. This is what drives what we see online and in print far more than any desire for true objectivity and truth.
There is a reason that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty build so many "human rights" campaigns around anti-Israel themes - because they attract more donations than fundraisers for Rwanda.
Money, and fame, make the world go 'round. And they are both the enemies of objectivity.
I learned two other things from this episode.
One is that I wa unaware of trypophobia, the fear of repetitive patterns of holes. Several commenters mentioned that the picture triggered them. For that, I'm sorry.
So, I ordered some toasted watermelon seeds from a Florida company called Yossef Roasting/IL Nuts, although the products themselves do not seem to be from Israel.
I really wanted to like them, but I'm sorry to say that watermelon seeds are not to my taste. The flavor was OK but I don't like how they felt in my mouth as I was chewing them.
Live and learn.
