Pranksters fooled some media members into thinking they’d been laid off by Elon Musk soon after his Twitter takeover. In reality, they were making reference to a common internet joke involving testicles. Yeah. Not great.
A few different media members and media outlets posted about Twitter employees leaving the company’s HQ, boxes of personal belongings in hand. One of the more prominent posts came from CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa, who posted that an “entire team of data engineers” had been let go.
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Folks soon followed up to Bosa and others noting that one of the pranksters had told reporters their name was “Rahul Ligma.” For those not terminally online, that’s a joke about, well, there’s no delicate way to put this…balls. Because Ligma sounds like lick my and then…you can guess where the joke typically goes. It’s juvenile and dumb, sure. But that’s the internet, baby.
A handful of outlets, like CNBC and Bloomberg, initially fell for the hoax. Both outlets issued statements and changed their stories. Bosa tweeted: “fyi -some questions being raised about whether these are really twitter employees.”
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There were some other clues the actors might not have been on the up-and-up. As The Verge noted, one of them says, “It makes me worry about the future of our democracy…the future of celebrity conservatorship. I mean, when Britney [Spears] happened…”
The Verge also reported that they confirmed the identity of “Ligma” and that they were not a Twitter employee.
Also the person who said their name was Ligma randomly held up a picture of Michelle Obama and said, “Michelle Obama wouldn’t have happened if Elon Musk owned Twitter.” That might’ve been a clue.
Yeah, so, it was questionable, at best. To be fair to the media outlets, it’s a pretty strange thing to fake, especially considering Musk did lay off top executives after taking over Twitter. It also came out that he floated the idea of firing 75 percent of Twitter employees.
Musk, famous for a juvenile sense of humor and distrust of the media, of course commented on the Ligma hoax soon after it broke. “Ligma Johnson had it coming,” he joked.
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The real mass layoffs might still come. But for now, at least the fake ones seemed to make Twitter’s new owner laugh.
