News Brief

The Best And Worst Tweets Of 2019

People still bad, animals still good

Twitter, as Bailey Martens recently examined, can be both a crucial tool for journalists and an anxiety-inducing hellscape. It’s perhaps not surprising that a medium that — more than any that has ever existed — stamps out the space between having a thought and publishing it to the world would result in a mixed bag at best.

As such, Twitter has no shortage of the virtuous and the reprehensible, of the inspiring and the depressing. But the very best and worst tweets are the ones that creatively reach these heights and/or depths. It’s one thing for a reporter to have terrible opinions about harm reduction; it’s another for him to take immense pride in kicking to death a “potentially rabid” raccoon. But we aren’t including that here, as not only do you deserve better than to stumble across such pics in your year-end, semi-comatose scrolling, but it wasn’t even his worst tweet of the year. (For the record, this was.)

With that in mind, here are the best and worst things that entered our bubble in 2019, in chronological and no other order:

A tweet from CBC News, "Video shows youth standing extremely close to elderly man while others laugh." It links to a story about the MAGA-hat-wearing students who confronted and mocked an Indigenous demonstrator at that Washington rally.

A tweet from Norm Kelly (@norm) asking, "Can you imagine having a lunch with AOC and Ben Shapiro?" He accompanies it with photos of Lilly Singh (not AOC) and Shapiro.

A sincere-looking tweet from Joe Warmington asking Gerald Butts, Justin Trudeau, and the Environment Minister (all of whom he tagged) whether they wanted to comment on a Sun story "about cross breeding between humans and aliens, Abductions and climate change." There's a photo of an article from the paper with the headline "Aliens are hooking up with humans: Prof" and a picture of a grey alien pointing its finger.

An exchange between Robyn Urback, Jonathan Kay, and Barbara Kay that starts with Urback complaining about nepotism in Canadian politics and devolves into some weird thing with the two Kays bickering, or at least pretending to bicker, about family stuff.

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