Twitter’s been steadily tumbling downhill ever since Gamergate turned it into the de facto platform for online harassment, but it’s only gotten worse since the Trump presidency emboldened an entire generation of neo-Nazis to put swastikas in their avatars. As our president tweets out racially charged Faces Of Death outtakes and “alt-right” dipshits use the platform to run smear campaigns, we’ve been forced to find refuge in the accounts of corporations like MoonPie and Wendy’s, for Christ’s sake.
Speaking of Wendy’s, it was teenager Carter Wilkerson’s appeal for free nuggets that topped the year’s list of most retweeted tweets. That information comes from Twitter itself, which took a break from not doing anything about its harassment problem to share what most captivated the platform’s users this year. The best news? Nary a single Donald Trump tweet made the cut.
Rather, it was Barack Obama’s heartfelt response to August’s violent Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that scored the most likes on Twitter.
Both Obama’s support of John McCain in the wake of the Arizona senator’s cancer diagnosis and his final tweet before leaving office—“I’m asking you to believe—not in my ability to create change, but in yours”—were also among the year’s most liked and retweeted. In fact, a look at the most popular tweets of the year makes it easy to forget all the vile stuff, what with several of the tweets doubling as fundraising opportunities. See the full list over at BuzzFeed.
Donald Trump did take one distinction, however, in that he was apparently the most tweeted-about elected world leader. That said, #resist surpassed #MAGA as the most tweeted “activism hashtag.” That’s good, right?
