[LINK] Rosemary Counter on surviving the Twitter mob

[rfmcdonald]

In MacLean's, journalist Rosemary Counter describes how she survived a fierce global Twitter reaction to one of her articles.

At 1:54 a.m., the first tweet came. “Please help, very racist article!” it read, with a sudden sense of urgency and a link to my most recent piece in a city newspaper. The headline, at the time, read, “A feast of local delicacies not for the faint-hearted,” and the body was a short travel piece about challenging myself to eat strange (to me) local delicacies while in the Philippines.

A few months earlier, and with the help of a Filipino guide who kindly escorted me around Palawan ordering foods for me to try, I’d eaten woodworm and “chicken ass” (his words) and crocodile. With what was supposed to be a Buzzfeed-esque quick-hit tone, I described each with a personal “ick factor,” then ate them anyhow. I enjoyed all but one, a boiled duck embryo called balut, which, because I’d eaten all the other foods and topped it off with a malaria pill in sweltering heat, I took one look at before vomiting over a wall. (Once upon a time, this was a funny story.) I returned to Canada with fabulous memories and experiences, psyched to write about my trip.

The first piece published was about my afternoon at the Selfie Museum at Manila, the world’s first and only selfie museum. Nobody noticed it.

Similarly, the food piece, for five glorious days, received only a handful of the usual “great job!” comments and a casual few Facebook likes, mostly for the photo of me with my tongue out and about to eat a woodworm, which we’d added at the last minute just for fun. Otherwise, the piece’s tone was amped up to be “edgy,” then turned up another notch online, where its title changed to “PETA-offending treats on the menu in the Philippines.”

The click bait didn’t work; the piece failed to gain steam and I had mostly already forgotten about it. I was getting married out of town that weekend, had been frantic and distracted for months. In fact, at first, I wasn’t even sure which piece the tweet referred to. In six years as a freelance writer, I’ve only dabbled in travel writing, but a handful of pieces came to mind as maybe-offenders. In those same six years, I’ve become used to the occasional negative tweet. Usually, I immediately and sheepishly apologize.