Muslims Report Stuff

Muslims Report Stuff

At the second muslims-report-stuffpresidential debate, a Muslim member of the Town Hall audience asked Donald Trump what could be done to reduce the intense level of Islamophobia. Trump replied with what many Americans think is an outstanding solution to address these concerns and help Make America Safe Again: “We have to be sure that Muslims come in and report when they see something going on.”

What a brilliant idea. It appears Muslims by the thousands are embracing his advice – by taking to Twitter to report anything they witness in their Muslim community that seems suspicious. There’s even a Twitter hashtag they’ve created: #MuslimsReportStuff (honest!). Below are some tweets typical of what you’ll find there.

I, for one, can’t thank Donald Trump enough for his inspired idea to enlist Muslims in keeping America safe – from Muslims. They seem to be doing a fantastic job so far. Keep up the great work, everybody!

[Author’s disclaimer: The tweets posted below are all made up by me, Tim Jones, and do not represent actual tweets from actual Muslims. To see actual tweets, go to Twitter and search on #MuslimsReportStuff.]
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OMG! GR8 News. IC LOC has Twttr. Itz 4 Real. Deets B-low. TTYL RLWNM*

OMG! GR8 News. IC LOC has Twttr. Itz 4 Real. Deets B-low. TTYL RLWNM*

(* Translations for the TI – “Twitter-impaired”: OMG: “Oh My God”;  GR8: “Great”; Twttr: “Twitter”; IC: “I see”; LOC: “Library of Congress”;  Itz: “It’s”; 4: “for”; Deets: “Details”;  TTYL: “Talk To You Later”; RLWNM: “Random Letters With No Meaning”)

In a critically important and bold act of government intervention, it was announced last week that the US Library of Congress (henceforth LOC) will soon be digitally archiving the entire collection of public tweets dating all the way back to Twitter’s inception in March 2006. How many tweets will that be? Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, many of which are vaguely intelligible, with the total to date numbering in the billions. It would take the average person reading 16 hours a day over six thousand years to read all the tweets posted to date or a long weekend to read all the ones having any remote historical significance.

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History Improved through technology: Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” Tweet

History Improved through technology: Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” Tweet

twitter bird - main

I was tweeting the other day – you know, on Twitter…. What, you are not familiar with Twitter? How about Facebook? No? Does “the Internet” ring a bell? Okay, in case you’re still living in that cave in Northern Afghanistan (or are my elderly mother) and you’re still not familiar with Twitter, it’s this web site where you can tell the world what you’re doing – so long as you can do it in 140 characters or less.  But, and this is key, your message must be of interest to absolutely NOBODY but yourself.

It is such an incredible improvement over previous ways of communicating online. Instead of having to pound out long, detailed emails, now you can post easy-to-skim “tweets” as Twitter posts are called.  Oh sure, some people say that most tweets are just a complete narcissistic waste of time. But I could not disagree more. Heck, just this morning, I learned the following very timely and helpful information at my Twitter home page from some fascinating people, a couple of whom I think I might have actually heard of:

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