Social media

The Greeks had Aesop, whose Fables attempted to teach moral lessons using, for the most part, a cast of animal characters. On the internet, we have a tale of a pizza. But not just any pizza. A deep-fried BBQ chicken quesadilla pizza with a sour cream and mayonnaise dipping sauce. And what unfolded when the video of how to create it went viral this weekend is, when you think about it, the perfect fable for the age we live in. It’s an era where just about everything is fake, and even if it’s fake, it’s profitable. Social media is full of cooking videos – filmed from above, often with time lapses or sped-up video, made popular by the likes of BuzzFeed.

Twenty years ago, the death of Bianca Devins would have been a small town horror story. Tragic. Brutal. Stomach-turning. Essentially local. A jealous man stabbed her to death in a fit of outrage before trying, and failing, to kill himself. Something of this kind happens too often for anyone to hear about them all. Bianca Devins's killer did something different, though: he took pictures of the 17-year-old’s dead body and posted them online, to a private forum on the app Discord. He also took pictures of himself after his suicide attempt and uploaded them as well. Little information on the murder is reliable. Rumors spread that Devins's killer was an 'incel' and a 'stalker'. Other rumors spread that he was in fact her boyfriend.

To peruse any of the tens of thousands of Instagram accounts devoted to food, some of them with nearly a million followers, is a jaunt into the pornographic. The photo captions alone seem straight out of paperback erotica. ‘See this naughty Asian pear get humiliated by sticky globs of caramel-infused pistachio milk while creepy cranberry sorbet watches,’ some of them might as well read. ‘This moist blood orange bundt cake is loaded with drippy pink glaze and grew up without a father.’ On Instagram, like Pornhub, you can sort by fetish. Got a thing for cakes and pies? Stylish editorial displays? Pizza? Seasonal vegetables? There’s a feed for every perversion, even at least one devoted to sprinkles, which is legitimately unsettling.

A quick scroll through Chicago-based Kelly Larkin’s Instagram account or lifestyle blog, Kelly in the City, is enough to put anyone in a good mood. It’s a blend of bright patterns, fresh and clean interior spaces, and high-quality photos of Larkin, her husband, their toddler daughter, and Noodle the dachshund. The Larkins are aspirational yet accessible, and Kelly Larkin herself, a former journalist and public school teacher, is funny and quick-witted about life and parenting.

It wasn’t so long ago Trump’s tweets were easily the planet’s most important media events. Comedy zingers, outrageous denunciations of the previously undenounceable, white knuckle threats of nuclear apocalypse sent in the small hours… how we hung on the leader of the free world’s every word. But now, suddenly, it feels like he’s phoning them in – tweeting by numbers. Where’s the brio? Where’s the zip? The heart seems gone. I can’t help but wonder if he needs more Executive Time. Sure, the insults and the catchphrases are still there, but they no longer carry the famous Trump bite. Take these tweets – two of his more lively – from the last seven days: https://twitter.

I met Titania McGrath at the Genderfree Silent Poetry Class I used to attend on a Thursday evening at the Basement Bar in York. I remember her standing out from the rest of the artistes because of the amount of screaming she did. Since her first draft of ‘My Ovaries Are The Devil’s Kidneys’ which she wrote back in 2013, her work has come on in leaps and bounds, and improved with every court summons. More recently she has found her niche on Twitter. She inspires thousands of followers, or dare I say, disciples, with a heady mixture of defiant slam poetry and staunch feminist views. Her poems are raw, unbridled, angry, and often nonsensical. Like Lewis Carroll meets Quentin Tarantino.

I woke up this morning to a private message on Twitter from a young student. She had been warned that her account would be suspended if she ‘violated the rules’ again. Her crime? Tweeting details of Sheila Jeffreys’s book, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism. Refusing to accept the mantra ‘Trans women are women’ is, in the eyes of many now, a crime, for which there must be punishment. Everyone from massive corporate social media machines to well-meaning liberals seem to be toeing the line. But some of us resist. Meghan Murphy for example, a Vancouver-based feminist journalist, has been permanently banned from Twitter for referring to a man who identifies as a woman as a man.