These May Well Be the Worst, Most Cringeworthy Tweets Ever Compiled

On Twitter, writer Mike Benner asked a simple question that provoked many, many responses: what is the worst tweet you’ve seen? The replies were so gloriously cringeworthy we had to collect them here.

While quite a few of the offending tweets have been deleted, some are so infamous that they are cached forever, a quick Google image search away. Others have been screenshot and saved for posterity. Chances are that someone will keep the receipts on your terrible tweets, especially if you’re a high-profile account. This brings us to one of the soundest pieces of advice there is: don’t tweet.

Or at least, as these examples will demonstrate, stop and think before you tweet. Remember that many a tweet—especially about celebrities and politicians—do not age well. The tweets shared in Benner’s thread also remind us that Twitter has gone through various stages throughout history; as virulent and doom-laden as it might seem these days, who remembers the Wild West era of the early years where everyone was tweeting every single thing that came to mind without filter?

This would perhaps best be evidenced by a certain Kevin Smith tweet.

What’s great about the Worst Tweets thread is it transcends all the divisions in today’s society. We have liberals! We have conservatives! We have feminists and MRAs, young and old, folks across many spectrums of identity. No matter what group you belong to, chances are there’s a person therein who should perhaps not be tweeting so much!

We should probably not tweet about politicians as though they are characters on a TV drama or our friends or our fantasies. This results in a type of cringe that cannot be unseen.

Certain politicians should also never tweet.

One of the worst genres of awful tweets is when someone of note dies and people seem determined to write fanfiction of them being welcomed into heaven by other people of note. This happens far too much, trust me.

Please, please, please can we stop with the famous people in heaven hanging out tweet. Please.

What. Is. This.

There are some that just make you want to lie down on the floor and pinch the bridge of your nose between your fingers to stave off the headache that the words induce.

Even our literary luminaries have not always mastered the art of the tweet, in that sometimes they should not tweet.

Are you in the right headspace to receive information that could possibly hurt you?

Misguided attempts at relevancy by brands to commemorate solemn concepts or attempts to tie in real-life events to entertainment could be its own post.

Of course, some of the “worst” tweets also resulted in some of the most epic rebuttals of all time.

Along these same lines, there are some people whose opinions about women we really, really never need to hear.

And then there are the people who are telling on themselves.

Impossible to forget this classic, once seen.

Some tweets are just truly unfortunate.

Author Naomi Wolf—now suspended from Twitter for spreading anti-vaccine misinformation—demands her very own subcategory.

But what, you may ask, is the best tweet amongst these follies? I’m glad you asked.

There are a plethora of additional so-bad-they’re-good tweets to be found in the replies to Benner’s original thread. Some are so head-scratching and eye-widening I’ve not included them because I care about you as a person, so peruse at your own risk.

While many of the tweets featured here are in the hall of fame of bad tweets, there may be some that we’ve missed. Do you have more reasons not to tweet to share with the class?

(via Mike Benner on Twitter, image: Mikhail Nilov/Pexels)

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Kaila Hale-Stern

Kaila Hale-Stern (she/her) is a content director, editor, and writer who has been working in digital media for more than fifteen years. She started at TMS in 2016. She loves to write about TV—especially science fiction, fantasy, and mystery shows—and movies, with an emphasis on Marvel. Talk to her about fandom, queer representation, and Captain Kirk. Kaila has written for io9, Gizmodo, New York Magazine, The Awl, Wired, Cosmopolitan, and once published a Harlequin novel you'll never find.

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