What makes for a good Twitter melee? Put together an article on the cow, differing opinions and a few hot-headed tweets, and there’s bound to be an affray. But the secret ingredient that often turns this into an old-fashioned ideological clash is a hashtag gone wrong.
That’s what happened on Friday.
Beginning early morning, a sponsored article on the website Your Story began gaining traction on Twitter. The article speaks of an initiative that promotes sustainable agriculture by urging farmers to use “traditional, locally available” solutions. Among those solutions is integrating native cattle breeds “into farming practices to improve soil fertility, lower input costs, and raise farmers’ profits”.
The initiative, founded by Chetan Raut, an engineer, is called Cowism.
With a name like that, a Twitter hashtag was perhaps inevitable. One of the first tweets about the article called the initiative an “excellent” idea that should be replicated widely, and suffixed the message with the hashtag #Cowism.
After that it didn’t take very long for Twitterati to lose perspective. The original story was forgotten, and it all became about cow veneration.
As others quarrelled, Twitter also somehow managed to come up with witticisms:
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