Breitbart Writer Complains About Trolling For Pageviews...By Trolling For Pageviews

I loathe what passes for conversation online these days. Every story, each tidbit of news is chewed up and spit out as a series of predictable, knee-jerk political hack phrases and/or animated gifs. Any interesting event is distilled down to a listicle, a few comments such as "media elite" or "racist hillbilly" and then everyone swaps traffic for a few hours until the next outrage de jour comes along a few hours later.

Friday night's hot topic on Twitter was the unfortunate case of Jennifer Sacco, who made the mistake of tweeting this just before she got on a plane for a ten hour flight:

Unfortunately for Ms. Sacco, Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski retweeted it to his followers and before long we had jumped into the predictable social media firestorm of fake Twitter accounts, Buzzfeed listsicles and press releases from her employer disavowing her tweet. People were monitoring the progress of her flight and by the time it landed and she apparently deleted her Twitter account, we were through phase one of this edition of "trolling the Internet for pageviews."

Phase two generally brings the posts from people arguing against conventional wisdom and if possible framing the story as just another example of the "liberal media elite" or "intolerant Conservatives" ruining some poor person's life. And predictably, one of the most entertaining examples of the "I'm going to complain about trolling for pageviews by trolling for pageviews" today comes from Breitbart.com's John Nolte.

In the headline of his post "Why Did Buzzfeed & Co. Target Jennifer Sacco For Online Assassination," Nolte includes all the needed ingredients for the perfect clickbait story. He includes the term most likely to be searched for (Jennifer Sacco), the name of the person and/or site he's using as his target for punching up (Buzzfeed) and a term that's likely to spark a knee-jerk response (Online Assassination). Well done, John. The SEO gods would be pleased.

Granted, the post meanders a bit when it comes to logic since the best defense for Sacco is to essentially say "Hey, it sucks that this happened to someone." And that's true enough, but that argument doesn't drive a lot of traffic. So Nolte argues that Buzzfeed shouldn't have picked on Sacco and that there are thousands of examples of tweets just as bad - or worse - that deserve attention. That's true enough, but what made Sacco's tweet so memorable is that she makes her living as a PR person. It's like discovering that your accountant bounced a couple of checks. It might have been an accident, but given their job skills, it's a bit of a shocker.

But this wouldn't be traffic trolling if it didn't include some vague attribution of evil intent:

If BuzzFeed and Co.  wanted to feel self-righteous about themselves, there are literally millions of tweets out there that are unquestionably indefensible and that are not written by some defenseless, unsuspecting woman about to step off a plane and into social media Hell.

Maybe BuzzFeed and its sorry band of elite media minions chose Sacco to send an intimidating message that says no one is safe from their speech rules, even nobodies with 174 Twitter followers. Randomly pulling people from their online homes as an example to the rest of us, is certainly going to have a chilling effect.

But maybe it was a targeted hit based on a personal grudge or agenda we will never know about.

Or maybe Buzzfeed just saw the tweet and someone thought "Hey, it's a tFriday night, I'm guessing people will click on this."

Nolte goes on to compare Sacco to Sarah Silverman and along the reference both Kafka and the elite media. But at the end of it all, there doesn't seem to be much to the post except a lot of complaints that those online people are just so darn mean.

Buzzfeed isn't responsible for Jennfer Sacco's career problems. Yes, no matter what you think of what she said, it sucks that it all turned out this way. But if you have a public social media account - even one that isn't followed by many people - you have to assume that what you say can be highlighted/taken out of context/thrown back in your face.

It's one of the first lessons that any good PR person explains to their clients. The fact that PR vet Sacco forgot that is the story here. It's momentary stupidity, not another example of the PC police or some secret plan coordinated by the liberal media industrial complex.

Geez, let's get some perspective here.