INDIANAPOLIS – By their very nature, social media platforms like Twitter are subject to their users posting and publishing just about anything they please, including materials that clearly violate the platform’s terms of use.
In Twitter’s case, even though porn (and “promotion” thereof) officially is disallowed, anyone familiar with the service knows pornographic images are tweeted with regularity, not just by individual users, but by bots designed specifically to tweet porn and porn-related links.
For a variety of reasons, including the sheer volume of daily tweets and the vastly greater importance of tweets from particularly high-profile individuals (especially super-important messages concerning media figures who have received facelifts), we don’t hear about every porn-tweet to pop into existence, even though sometimes it feels like we do.
Clearly, what makes a porn-tweet newsworthy is the level of fame possessed by the user who sends it. If my neighbor was to tweet a picture of a naked woman, for example, nobody would care — not just because he’s an asshole with approximately four followers, but because he has no off-Twitter notoriety, either.
Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay has around 428,000 followers — a large number to be sure, but nowhere near the follower count of former The Apprentice star Donald Trump, who currently boasts almost 77 times as many.
While one can understand why Trump’s every tweet is subjected to media scrutiny (the man is a WWE Hall of Famer, after all) when was the last time you remember anybody talking about a Jim Irsay tweet? Well, we’re certainly hearing about an Irsay tweet now, and not because he’s trading Andrew Luck for Mark Sanchez or apologizing for being shitfaced behind the wheel.
No, Irsay’s tweet had nothing to do with football or booze. Instead, it was about a naked Hungarian chick with fake boobs and an apparent habit of adopting terribly uncomfortable-looking poses in the back seats of limousines.
Irsay’s tweet is believed by many observers to be the result of an actual hack (as opposed to a regret-based hack claim from someone who is clearly full of shit), primarily because he mentioned his account had been compromised about two weeks ago.
Personally, I don’t give a steaming pile of Indianapolis Colt-shit whether Irsay was hacked, too drunk to realize he’d tweeted instead of sexted, or just an enthusiastic fan of Anette Dawn. The fact this porn-tweet is big news is just fifty shades of dumb.
Let’s suppose, for the sake of #argument, Irsay wasn’t hacked and did tweet a picture of a naked Hungarian porn star sitting in the back of a limo with her legs spread. Aside from providing a too-easy-to-resist opportunity for snide assholes like me to take cheap shots at him, what’s the significance of the tweet?
No matter how you slice it, this is far from the biggest mistake anyone named Irsay connected with the Colts franchise has made. That distinction clearly goes to Jim’s dad, Robert, who once traded future Hall of Famer and bowl-cut hair innovator John Elway for Chris Hinton, a draft pick (which turned out to be Ron Solt) and a bag of “magic beans” (which turned out to be rat feces) to round out the deal.
In fairness to Bob Irsay, Chris Hinton became a solid offensive lineman, and it’s easy to mistake rat feces for magic beans when you’re tanked on cheap vodka, model glue and runaway professional-sports-team-owner ego. Plus, unlike his allegedly hacked son, Bob never tweeted a picture of a naked Hungarian — although this may stem from Bob’s death nine years before Twitter launched.
In any event, it’s clear there’s an incredibly simple formula that determines whether any given porn-tweet is newsworthy, and the equation is Fame + Twitter + Porn = Newsworthy.
So, all you rule-abiding porn marketers who find yourselves stymied by Twitter’s porn-unfriendly content policies, if you want to promote your smut on Twitter in a way that is sure to go viral, it’s clear you need to convince some famous guy to tweet your porn, then blame it on hackers or “a friend” or maybe even the Devil.
Alternatively, you can just hack J.R. Smith’s account and do it yourself.
