Patton Oswalt Pissed Off A Lot Of People With His Brilliant ‘Deleted Tweets’ Experiment
He went on Craig Ferguson overnight to explain the whole thing.
Earlier this week, comedian Patton Oswalt took to Twitter to conduct a “deleted tweet experiment”, which basically involved tweeting apologies for tweets that he never actually sent. Predictably, Twitter chaos and confusion ensued. Last night, Oswalt appeared on Craig Ferguson’s The Late Late Show to explain how the experiment played out, revealing that the whole thing was born from boredom and was just one massive mind game.
It all began with this tweet.
Oops. Just deleted my last Tweet. & would like to apologize to seniors & sufferers of Lyme disease. I was out of bounds.
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) May 7, 2014
And from there, it escalated. Quickly.
Yikes. Had to delete another Tweet. I crossed a line on that one. Also, I thought 12 YEARS A SLAVE and THE BUTLER were brilliant.
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) May 7, 2014
Forgive me. Previous Tweet deleted. Sorry. Yes, we all know what “grape”, “ape”, “tape” & “cape” rhyme with. I’m an asshole.
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) May 7, 2014
Previous Tweet very hurtful. Already deleted. @KimKardashian & @JoeBiden are national treasures. As are our Native American friends.
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) May 7, 2014
The FUCK is wrong with me? Last Tweet deleted. The victims of the Holocaust deserve our highest respect, not penis limericks.
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) May 7, 2014
Gonna leave Twitter for a bit. Deleted my last Tweet. Just because “Don Sterling” rhymes with “Gone curling” doesn’t make it funny.
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) May 7, 2014
The tweets made people pretty angry, with some saying he had gone too far. Daily Dot called for Twitter users to unfollow Oswalt, saying “The premise of his Twitter experiments are always the same: use the platform in such a way that people who are in on the gag can congratulate themselves on their literacy, while everyone else gets offended.” But as Uproxx pointed out, there was actually nothing to be offended by, “the joke being, there was no joke.”
Whatever camp you fall into, Oswalt’s ‘experiment’ raised some serious questions: How can we be outraged by something that was never actually said? Or is the experiment a valid comment on how quickly we’re willing to condemn someone on social media?
it’s pretty amazing that patton oswalt can create twitter outrage by pretending to delete a tweet he never wrote.
— Wes (@thewesdub) May 7, 2014
@pattonoswalt I disapprove of what you didn’t say, but I will defend to the death your right to not say it.
— Ron Cacace (@Rawnzilla) May 7, 2014
Oswalt is quite experienced with the whole Twitter experiment thing: in August last year, he tweeted a series of two-part tweets that caused a similar amount of online confusion. At the time, Mashable wrote: “When taken together, [the tweets] read like harmless, politically correct social commentary. But taken separately, some read shockingly offensive… He’s trolling the Twitter trolls as a way of trolling the Twitter trolls.”
If that’s his end game, he’s doing it right.