While You Were Offline: Welcome Back to the Newsfeeds, Hobby Lobby!

March 20, 2019 Off By EveAim

Last week might have seemed like a short one thanks to the Fourth of July holiday, but as anyone who has ever been online knows, the internet doesn't sleep. So even while you were taking it easy, something was happening on social media. Like what? For one, everyone was talking about the photos that came out of President Trump's meeting with German chancellor Angela Merkel at the G20 summit. And for another, this piece on the future of football turned out to be a viral sensation, thanks to being not really about football at all. Think you might have missed something while you were napping off that hot dog hangover? Here are the highlights of the last seven days' internet buzz.

The Politics/Wrestling Crossover No One Expected

What Happened: President Trump sent out a tweet that showed him fake-pummeling CNN at a wrestling match. It was a strange crossover of politics and wrestling that pretty much no one saw coming.

What Really Happened: It all started, last weekend, with a tweet.

Yes, that's the president of the United States continuing his one-man war on CNN using a video made from footage of his 2007 appearance at WrestleMania XXIII, with the cable news network's logo pasted over the head of his "victim." It didn't take long for CNN to respond:

The origin of the image, apparently, was a Reddit user named, of all things, "HanAssholeSolo." To borrow a phrase from cop shows, the user had priors.

And then things got… weirder. HanAssholeSolo not only recanted his earlier Reddit posts, he reached out to CNN to apologize, claiming that the meme was "created purely as satire, it was not meant to be a call to violence against CNN or any other news affiliation." Satire? Well, that's a bit of a stretch, but sure. The thing folks latched onto from the story, though, came from one particular line, which the network's Andrew Kaczynski highlighted on Twitter.

"CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change." It was a line that had a lot of people wondering whether or not this was a threat of doxing or not. And then there were those who decided it was definitely that.

Hey, why don't we throw a hashtag into the equation?

Of course, amidst all the noise, CNN's statement on the matter went more or less unheard.

With the story continuing to make headlines days later, things took another turn late last week when it emerged that the White House might use the merger between CNN's parent company Time Warner and AT&T as "a point of leverage" over the news network, giving all new meaning to "no holds barred."

The Takeaway: Man, 2017 has really turned into one wild ride, right?

We Hold These Truths to Be Embarrassingly Evident

What Happened: NPR gave the internet a history lesson—one that some needed more than others.

What Really Happened: How did you spend your Fourth of July? If you were NPR, you did what you always do on Independence Day: broadcast a reading of the Declaration of Independence. This year, as a fun addition to that tradition, it decided to tweet out the entire thing, piece by piece, in a long series of posts.

Not everyone was on board with this idea, however:

And then, there were those who were upset because they didn't recognize the source, and thought NPR was editorializing:

In fact, it turned out that many people thought NPR was tweeting about the current US president. (Most of them deleted their tweets after the fact, but don't worry, there are screenshots in those linked stories above. Go see.)

This, of course, provided no shortage of amusement to those on the side of the political spectrum who aren't exactly fans of President Trump:

The moral of this story? Look before you leap into outrage. Or, at least, Google something that sounds very old fashioned and out of character for a tweet from a public radio organization.

The Takeaway: OK, there might be another moral here as well.

Welcome Back to the Newsfeeds, Hobby Lobby!

What Happened: Hobby Lobby—the company that sued the government over Obamacare and won—made headlines again last week for the most unexpected reason imaginable.

What Really Happened: What goes around, it turns out, comes around in the strangest, least likely way possible. How so? Well, let's go back to 2014. Three years ago the craft store chain Hobby Lobby won a landmark victory when the US Supreme Court found that corporations could be exempt from providing certain types of healthcare to their employees if there were legitimate religious reasons for them to oppose providing that care. Yet, while it scored a win against the government in that case, it appears to be losing big this time around. Apparently, the company bought thousands of artifacts smuggled out of Iraq, and is now facing millions of dollars in fines.

Twitter, naturally, was primed and ready to seize on the moment of schadenfreude.

And what does Hobby Lobby have to say for itself? "We should have exercised more oversight and carefully questioned how the acquisitions were handled,” company president Steve Green said in a statement. "We have accepted responsibility and learned a great deal."

The Takeaway: Is there any way this could get stranger? Probably, yeah!

Math Is Hard

What Happened: US Secretary of Energy Rick Perry gave a less-than-stellar explanation of supply and demand. The internet noticed.

What Really Happened: As if to remind people that he existed, Rick Perry visited a power plant in West Virginia this week and delivered a gaffe almost targeted at getting him his own dose of internet derision.

Thing is, as many pointed out across the media, that's really not how supply and demand works. Twitter, would you like to comment?

The Takeaway: This thing is a lot more fun when it's explained with cats.

Cute and Paste

What Happened: A Twitter user employed a little Photoshop magic to heal a broken heart but ended up healing the world—or, at least, a small corner of the world for a few seconds.

What Really Happened: As everyone knows, there is at least one surefire way to get over someone: Deleting your ex from photos, replacing them with celebrities, and then placing those pics on social media. (What, you're not doing this?)

As Dunn's tweet went viral, it turned out that plenty of other people wanted to share their experience of doing exactly the same thing.

Of course, it wasn't as if people didn't have some notes.

C'mon internet, let Gabi have the Photoshop hunk of her dreams!

The Takeaway: In the most wonderful postscript to the entire thing, it turns out that Ryan Reynolds is into it:

You know Ryan, if you really wanted to help, you'd offer up shots of yourself with greenscreen backgrounds to make cropping far easier. Just sayin'.