The Week on TwitterTopical

The Week on Twitter: Hearts, Christmas, and Enda Kenny

By Jade Hayden

This week, Twitter said a final farewell to the Web Summit, wept at an old man on the moon, and complained about Bank of Ireland a bit. We also told Enda Kenny all about our periods, and struggled to cope with the website’s new ‘like’ feature.

Twitter turns stars into hearts and everybody freaks out

During the week, Twitter scrapped their tweet favouriting system in favour of hearts and likes. Long gone are the days of favouriting somebody’s tweet as a simple gesture of acceptance, a modest grant of approval, or a means of bookmarking that shit for later. Now, we must ‘like’ it. Now, we must click a tiny little exploding heart to aggressively express our vague support of something. Now, we must lie to ourselves.

Lots of people got very angry about lots of different things – the majority of criticisms hailing from the fact that the hearts were too red, Favstar was definitely going to run out of business, and Twitter was becoming way too much like Facebook (and nobody likes Facebook).

https://twitter.com/hrtbps/status/661589877386035200

However, from chaos sprang mirth and merriment, as hundreds of men hellbent on preserving their masculinity expressed their absolute disgust towards the new feature. For them, tapping a heart was simply “too gay” or “very womanly.” They feared that Twitter had compromised their ability to remain ‘one of the lads,’ and vowed never to favourite (or like) another man’s tweet again. Their bromances were under attack, and they weren’t happy.

It was fun to watch.

https://twitter.com/Seamus_the_Bold/status/661773504115707904

Dublin says goodbye to the #WebSummit for the last time. Probably.

It’s been a very long week of webs and summits and web summit-y things. There were tears as the conference wrapped up for the (potential) final time yesterday in the RDS, there were tantrums as Paddy Cosgrave pulled out of his appearance on the Late Late, and there were actual brawls (probably) when Enda Kenny was offered a last minute invitation to the event.

Twitter had lots to say about the Web Summit – most of which concerned itself with the poor WiFi, again – but all-in-all people seemed to have a grand old time.

https://twitter.com/Jim_Sheridan/status/661544242490302464

(I actually can’t tell if that last one was a joke or not, but I’m going to go ahead and presume that it was.)

Goodbye Web Summit – see you soon! Maybe. Hopefully. Probably not…

Irish women tweet their periods to @EndaKennyTD

Yes, you did read that right. And yes, there is a reason for it – and it’s a good one too. Since the Irish government seem to think they have warranted control over all Irish women’s reproductive parts, comedian Gráinne Maguire thought it would be a good idea to let the Taoiseach know exactly how her womb was doing during her time of the month. And hundreds of others followed suit. It was great.

The tweets fell under the #Repealthe8th hashtag, and emphasised the lack of body autonomy Irish women have access to beneath the country’s abortion laws, and the current government’s apparent unwillingness to repeal the Eighth Amendment.

Maguire tweeted that it was “only fair the women of Ireland let our Leader @EndaKennyTD know the full details of our menstrual cycle” – and tell Enda the full details they did. While many simply jumped at the chance to have a bit of a laugh, and make the Taoiseach uncomfortable, others used the tag to express their relief upon discovering that they were not pregnant in a country that is failing to protect its pregnant women.

https://twitter.com/RosemaryMacCabe/status/662000395133329408

The campaign made international news, with articles popping up from the BBC, the Guardian, and even Buzzfeed (!)

Kenny has yet to respond to any of the tweets.

Bank of Ireland’s new cash restrictions are “surprising and unnecessary”

So said Finance Minister Michael Noonan this week when #BOI announced their plans to impose restrictions on over-the-counter cash transactions. Later this month, all cash deposits of under €3000, or less than fifteen cheques, will have to be lodged using Bank of Ireland’s ATMs or lodgement machines. As well as this, any withdrawals of under €700 will not be processed by BOI staff.

The restrictions have been criticised for ignoring the needs of those who do not regularly use ATMs or online banking services – such as the elderly, or people who live in rural areas with limited WiFi.

This is the second time in seven days that Bank of Ireland have caused a lot of people a lot of hassle. Last Friday, a processing delay meant that thousands around the country were left without their wages.

Halloween ends, #Christmas begins.

IT’S CHRISTMAAAAAAAAS. Sort of. Sunday morning saw the binning of all those semi-rotten pumpkins and dodgy Dealz costumes, to make way for fairy lights, nice trees, penguin-themed sweaters, and Baileys. Christmas seems to come around a little bit earlier every year, and every year people seem to get a little bit angrier about it. Those people took to Twitter to express their concern… And to make everyone else’s day a little bit bleaker.

Still, everyone knows it’s not Christmas without a John Lewis ad – and this year’s one came out this morning which was handy for this piece, and also for the thousands of people who just wanted to have a quiet sob down the back of the office on a Friday morning.

[iframe id=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/wuz2ILq4UeA” align=”center” autoplay=”no” maxwidth=”750″]

This year, the ad is about a #ManOnTheMoon who is very sad, but then he receives a present from a little girl and is subsequently happy again. John Lewis teamed up with Age Action UK to make the advert, which promotes the idea that nobody should be alone on Christmas – especially not the elderly – but also that we should all keep buying each other things because Capitalism.

It’s very nice and it made me cry. Here are some tweets about it.

Featured image via John Lewis via YouTube

Jade Hayden 144 posts 0 comments

Jade Hayden has an MA in journalism, a degree in English, and a house rabbit who sleeps in her bed sometimes. You'll often find her wearing glasses, fixing her fringe, and complaining about the amount of time she spends on public transport. Jade is also the editor of HeadStuff's topical section, and she'd love if you sent your submissions over to [email protected].

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