What Annoyed The Internet This Week?
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Humour is an age-old theory beginning with Plato in ancient Greece. Across cultures and throughout the ages, humour has taken many forms- satirical poetry, vernacular fiction and performing arts. Many people have tried and failed to grasp and master the complex art- from mediocre playwrights to disgraced comedians. Comedy and humour is a creative form that takes many skills to perfect: wit, speed and knowledge au courant. Of course, every now and then a willing and ambitious challenger who lacks skill and wit, will attempt to defy Plato’s most ancient laws and become a comedy master. Inevitably, they all fail.
The newest hopeful is 43-year old Brian ‘Limmy’ Limond who has enraged the internet this week with a series of fake screenshots under the guise of comedy. You may recognize Limond from the I.T. crowd and Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe. Despite his successes, he seems to find the most enjoyment from getting teenagers suspended from Twitter for 12 hours.
To do this, Limond fabricated a series of WhatsApp messages, all featuring the sender saying cruel things to the (fake) recipient. Since nothing surprises anyone anymore, Twitter users have been very quick to believe that these messages are genuine without doing the research. Rather than just being satisfied at successfully trolling the internet, the punchline of Limmy’s ‘joke’ is to coax Twitter users into writing abusive tweets and then reporting the user with the intention of having them suspended from Twitter.
This isn’t the first time Limond has done this. Every few months he resurfaces with his Whatsapp screenshots.
https://twitter.com/DaftLimmy/status/919499574401789952
Some of his old Whatsapp conversations include this (fake) exchange between a grandson and grandfather:
Twitter users were upset by the malicious nature of the messages and responded to Limond with a series of abusive tweets which was exactly what he was hoping for. He has had dozens of people temporarily and permanently suspended from Twitter over the last week.
https://twitter.com/DaftLimmy/status/921532972142157825
https://twitter.com/DaftLimmy/status/921138033331712000
He really seems to think that he has been the victim of unprovoked and unwarranted Twitter abuse. The whole Limmy scenario really highlights the problem with the Twitter guidelines. Journalists, politicians, and MPs such as Diane Abbott receive online abuse way worse than this and Twitter refuses to do anything about it yet somehow a middle-aged Scotsman can post sickening screenshots and be protected from anyone being able to slate him at all. Of course, no one should send abusive messages to anyone ever but if Limmy can receive this much support from Twitter administration then why can’t everybody?
The worst part of it all is that Limmy isn’t reporting people because he feels threatened or insulted, he’s doing it because he enjoys winding people up.
https://twitter.com/DaftLimmy/status/921275342656024581
This must be as good as life gets for some people. Some people (including the man himself) have labelled Limmy a sort of Internet hero: setting up traps to find out who is willing to send people abusive tweets and then having them removed from Twitter so that they can’t harass any other user. However, the vast majority of people think he has a bit too much time on his hands and an unhealthy craving for any type of attention.