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How Tumblr Changed My Life (A Submission!)

Sure, I’ll play STORYBOARD.

So once upon a time Sarah Palin decided to waltz into a New York City-specific debate over the placement of a downtown Islamic community center—then dubbed the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’—with a Facebook post calling its construction “an intolerable mistake.”

I realized I could report it for hate speech.

So I did, and I took a screenshot of myself doing it, and I put it on my tumblr. ”Tumblr: Help Report Sarah Palin’s Ground Zero mosque note to Facebook for being “Racist/Hate Speech,” I wrote. “Click-through to do it.” 

A lot of you did! And more importantly, a lot of you reblogged that note. Almost 1,000 of you.

So, that worked. It triggered Facebook’s robots, which pulled down her post, which got me very, very excited.

I told POLITICO what I’d done, explaining it was “a social experiment to explore the boundaries of Facebook’s government-like Terms and Conditions and the power of the Tumblr community,” and, “Free speech on the Internet is still a work in progress.”

Facebook had to figure out what went wrong.

TechPresident noted “Tumblr’s reblog ability to spread a meme rapidly seems to have worked as described.”

I wrote about it for The Daily Beast.

Facebook had to apologize to Sarah Palin.

I got called a “liberal goosestepping fascist” by one of Sarah Palin’s Internet friends.

Fun was had by all.

Somehow, that led to a job offer with the Beast and here I am, doing very little of those shenanigans and much more of this and this and this and this and this and this and this and all this and sometimes stuff like this.

28 notes

  1. jessbennett reblogged this from moneyries and added:
    Yes! Anyone else want to play? What’s your dashboard mean to you?
  2. ryanbrown reblogged this from moneyries
  3. This was featured in #Storyboard
  4. moneyries posted this