We Need to Talk About WSMV's Tweets

WSMV is getting roasted this morning for inexplicably wishing Ivanka Trump a happy birthday, and inviting followers to do the same. (Update: As of 11:20 a.m. they've deleted the tweet. See a screen shot below.)

I do not wish Ivanka Trump a happy birthday, and neither, it seems, do many of WSMV's Twitter followers. 

But those of you reacting to WSMV's tweet this morning merely adopted this mix of outrage and befuddlement. I was born in it, molded by it. I've been raising my eyebrows at WSMV's tweets for months now. And now we need to talk about what the hell is going on over there.

For a long time, WSMV has been engaging in the type of social media behavior you see from all local television outfits. They'll pull an outrageous or funny or cute or otherwise potentially viral story from the Associated Press or an NBC affiliate in some other state and tweet it out locally. This is fine in some cases. If a beagle somewhere has learned how to bark the Pledge of Allegiance, I want to know about it. Today, for instance, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is reporting that "multiple raccoons" took over a library at Arkansas State University. This is the kind of information that is irrelevant to my life in Nashville, yes, but crucial for me to know.

But in recent months, WSMV's way of using this sort of aggregation to troll Twitter for a few stray clicks has been more noticeable. Probably because of their aggressive hashtagging. 

Often, this practice has led them down some gross paths. Look, for instance, at how often they have used the hashtags #death and #tragic. (It gets worse than that.) This is a weird, tacky thing to do, quite literally reducing murders and horrible accidents to categories of #content. It's also worth noting that these posts get fairly little engagement in terms of retweets and likes. Even if a few people are clicking on them, it can't be worth how ghoulish they look. 

To be clear, the point here is not that WSMV is wrong for covering these stories or sharing lighthearted things on Twitter. (We love animal posts ourselves.) And they're not the only ones. Fox 17 does this weird thing where they start tweets by exclaiming things like "PRAYERS!" 

We're just saying, maybe we could dial it back a bit.