On Twitter, everyone will be famous for 15 seconds

Last week, after a smear campaign began in an attempt to discredit Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who worked with Edward Snowden to break the news about NSA spying, Greenwald's supporters counterattacked on Twitter with #ggscandals, a mock list of other possible blights to Greenwald's reputation. (The political context is an ongoing feud on Twitter between civil liberties supporters and Obama loyalists who despise Greenwald. It's one front of the larger war on Twitter over the NSA scandal and its meaning. Almost all my Twitter friends are battling the National Security State Axis.) My son Richard, who teaches English in South Korea, called my attention to the hashtag and we both contributed Tweets to it. Aside from the pushback to the attacks on Greenwald, it was fun to try to come up with a funny Tweet.

YES! magazine sorted through the hundreds of Tweets using the hashtag and did an article on the top 10 Tweets. My son and I both made the cut. You can see the article here.