Alyssa Milano and Ted Cruz provide two helpful illustrations on how to use social media as a celebrity. Alyssa Milano, for example, uses her massive reach to rally Democrats and left-leaning voters to the polls, and on Tuesday night was broadcasting updates for the contentious Congressional election in Georga that, ultimately, was won by the Republican candidate. While a lot of people were despairing in the immediate aftermath of that election, Milano fired off a note of solidarity:
That’s nice!
Now take Ted Cruz, who illustrates a different tactic on using Twitter—that is, creepily patrolling her page several days later and popping into frame with this absolutely bone-chilling missive:
The “optics,” as they say, of the reviled senator appearing unwarranted and some 40 fucking hours later, arms outstretched and wielding a menacing winky-face emoji, were not good. Milano responded swiftly:
Other possible replies include “The hug is over, Ted, it happened literally two days ago and it was among people who think you are a reprehensible, churlish slug,” or whatever Twitter’s equivalent of macing someone is. (What’s that? It’s only reporting them? Hm.) Of course, this is not the first hug-related snafu of recent memory. Let’s not forget the bizarre Marco Rubio-Ivanka Trump hug of earlier this week, which Rubio similarly made much, much worse by issuing a ton of jokes about on Twitter, as well as the Seinfeld-Kesha stonewalling of earlier this month.
Few are as chilling as Cruz’s, though, if only because of that emoji. As always, he is a wonderful example of how not to act in the world.