By Bryse Thornwell ’16

What was once known as the wonderful world of Twitter, complete with harmless tweets, hashtags, and animals doing tricks has quickly gone sour. Before the bloodshed began, occasionally we would scroll through our feed and find something that made us giggle in our heads, but not quite enough to “laugh out loud.” Other times we pretended that we did not enjoy our friends’ corny jokes or three-second updates about their evening at home. But recent savagery between Twitter users has sparked full-on wars between users.

Like many feuds, Twitter feuds usually start out small with a miscommunication. Theoretically, a big-name celebrity could tweet, “I hate sequins.” Suddenly, every sparkly sequin-wearing pop-star will assume the tweet was about them, and will take to Twitter to defend themselves and their fashion choices. People, both average and celebrity, will create and follow hashtags depicting their support for or against sequins as they watch in anticipation and constantly refresh their newsfeed.

Now, let us say two hours later when our “I hate sequins” celebrity checks back into Twitter. The first thing she would see are #IHateSequins and #SaveTheSequins as the most trending hashtags on Twitter, even if her anger at sequins was not directed at anyone and only originated from the fact she could not get them all out of her laundry machine.

However, sometimes in more real cases, we see feuds start from deliberate assaults. To recount history, we have seen Kanye West attack Wiz Khalifa when he assumed a tweet was about his beloved wife, Kim Kardashian. We watched in suspense as rapper Meek Mill took on Drake when he attacked his career by claiming Drake “doesn’t write his own raps.” We have even witnessed a full downfall of the famous boy band One Direction leading to the rise of Zayn’s solo empire. These celebrities, and many others, have exploited their technologies as they hide behind a screen shield and dish out insults as weapons they that would never use face to face.

Therefore, perhaps what is most amazing about Twitter feuds is the amount of damage that can be done from a single 140 or less character tweet by one person. Twitter has officially become an “every man for themselves” battlefield in which no one is safe from harm. The casualties add up every day and if we are not careful, our actions can have dire consequences.

So stop the bloodshed and be careful what you post online. You wouldn’t want to end the world and shut down the Internet.