Old Content Devoid of Any Context is a Plague on Twitter

Old, recycled content was a real issue on Twitter over the holiday weekend. Not in a real life problem kind of way, but in an annoying pet peeve kind of way. Take this tweet from Sunday for example. It looks like air diver Luke Aikins broke the world record for jumping without a parachute over the weekend. It is a crazy video.

The only problem is, it's five years old. This video was originally posted on July 30, 2016. In 2018 there was a story about the engineering that went into making the jump possible. The video in the tweet was taken from a random account created in February. The account that tweeted it and got 15,000+ retweets, @PriapusIQ, says it is "News & Commentary. Markets & Geopolitics. All Killer & No Filler."

On Sunday @MLB_fights posted this crazy video of a fan coming out of the stands to try and fight a pitcher who had just hit a batter. Considering the NBA fan incidents, this video was especially topical. It was presented without any context.

This video is seven years old. Here's the YouTube from 2014. Here's the post that we wrote about itthat day.

Barstool Sports then used the video on their main account. Again, it seems like this happened recently. Does it matter if it did or not? I guess not really? It's just a crazy video. But when the only context that anyone adds is one of the team accounts saying, "For the record, this did not happen recently," it seems disingenuous.

Obviously, no harm has actually been done. There are zero victims here, except maybe the Corpus Christi Hooks P.R. department who had to send out some tweets. Pageviews and retweets were attained and that's the end game so it's actually a job well done a mission accomplished.

The only person in the world who could possibly be upset by this is someone like me, who has spent way too much time trying to hunt down the origins and stories behind videos like these. But hey, if someone can post them whenever they want, I can add context and complain. So just know that I'm not mad. Please don't put in your next context-less tweet that I got mad. Just make sure to share this link.