With just precious few weeks leading to quite possibly the most important midterm election of our entire lives, pressure to register to vote is at an all-time high. If you’ve been on Twitter, you’ve likely seen your favorite celebrities encouraging registration and voter turnout.
Some media outlets are so desperate to get people to register to vote that they’ve even started employing trickery tactics, such as this tweet by Elle on Thursday that salaciously suggested that Kim Kardashian and Kayne West had split up. Given West’s increasingly frequent public meltdowns and questionable support for President Trump, it was the news gossip hounds were dying for.
https://twitter.com/ELLEmagazine/status/1052973502033264640
Unfortunately, hopes of Kardashian drama were dashed when the link simply led to a voter registration form.
While the heart was no doubt in the right place, the tweet was problematic in a number of ways. First and foremost, as many people pointed out, that Elle assumed its readers were too vapid to register to vote on their own, and had to be tricked into doing so with a celebrity gossip ruse.
https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/1052981204444700673
https://twitter.com/rgay/status/1052980089493762048
https://twitter.com/ErinStrecker/status/1052981370199396353
https://twitter.com/ira/status/1052985232008212480
This is what fake news looks like. It’s deceitful, ugly and just for the clicks. Big shame.
— Michael Litman (@mlitman) October 18, 2018
delete this.
— Ryan Mac 🙃 (@RMac18) October 18, 2018
https://twitter.com/lizzywol/status/1052984150175690752
The word for using Kim Kardashian and Kanye West's marriage this way dates back to the 1700s: Misdirection. https://t.co/QcojSmcmep https://t.co/pN9IWjovAH
— Dictionary.com (@Dictionarycom) October 18, 2018
this is a link to a voter registration page, which implies that elle readers aren't interested in voting unless they're being tricked into it with fake celeb breakup news, which seems…super insulting to elle readers, actually?
</humorlessness> https://t.co/u5o9d6fJhC
— Ariel Edwards-Levy (@aedwardslevy) October 18, 2018
Actually this is insulting to all women…why use click bait for voter registration? Do you assume readers of @ELLEmagazine aren’t smart enough to understand the importance of registering to vote?
— imawookiee2 (@darylwolke) October 18, 2018
I was gonna vote but now I don’t wanna
— america's lounge singer (@KrangTNelson) October 18, 2018
And then there was this tweet, mocking the RickRoll with a similar headline of Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson getting back together:
https://twitter.com/McJesse/status/1052984482507251712
Welp, they can’t all be Teen Vogue.