Cascade

I posted a photo of Britney Spears in a bikini. The caption was Britney, please put something on! I do this kind of thing all the time—toss up a photo, add something to it, see what people think. Usually it’s fine.

The comments came in fast. Someone read it as me calling her fat. The next person piled anorexia onto it. Then someone dragged child pornography into the conversation. Cheap booze, hipster accusations, Hollywood beauty standards—all of it landing on me somehow, within an hour, for things I never said.

What got to me was that nobody even asked what I meant. Maybe I thought Britney was too thin. Maybe her glasses looked bad. Maybe I didn’t want to see someone’s mother half-naked on the feed. Maybe there was just nothing to it at all. But nobody stopped to consider that. They just took whatever the previous person had twisted and twisted it worse.

This is how these storms actually work—it’s not anger, it’s telephone played by people too lazy to read. Someone says something weird, the next person adds their own slant, and after it’s bounced around enough times it becomes unmovable fact. The original thing disappears.

I watched it happen in real time and what struck me wasn’t the anger—it was how little it mattered what had actually been said. Everyone just heard what they wanted to hear and piled on. But maybe that’s always how it goes. You say something, people mishear it, and the truth becomes whatever screams loudest.