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Twitter Confession Booth

By Clive Martin

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Donte Jamar Sims, showing off that "Lee Harvey Oswald swagg"

In this Godless age we live in, it was inevitable that human beings would take to a new forum for their darkest confessions. The Pope-hating tag team of Henry VIII and reddit have systematically beaten the life out of the Catholic Church over the last 500 years with their Protestant Reformations and athiest memes. The confession booths of the world are empty, resigned to being mistaken for toilets by children on school trips. Man will always be a sinful creature, but where does it now go to admit its failures?

Twitter was basically invented for people to say things without thinking, and speak without thinking they do. Be it a footballer's opinion on the welfare state or Bret Easton Ellis' literary parring, tweeting before you think is standard procedure.

Today, we had the perfect example of a man who should probably invest in a copy of a legal dictionary or at least an Ally McBeal boxset if he wants to learn the differences between a death threat and "a little bit of fun". Behold 21-year-old Donte Jamar Sims, who decided to air his feelings about Barack Obama coming to town:

Apparently the secret service paid him a visit but they didn't seem to take him too seriously (I guess from their point of view it's just nice that he subscribes to the official version of events).

The darker side of the spectrum came with the sad (and horribly, horribly ironic) story of Ervin McKinness. Poor Ervin was drink-driving through the streets of Ontario, he was with four of his boys, they were speeding and the drinks were flowing. Seeing as Erv had access to a smartphone, he decided to let the world know what a ruddy good time he was having. He decided to do this with the pop-nihilist motto "YOLO".

Minutes later, Ervin and all of his passengers were dead, their Nissan Sentra embedded in a brick wall. I guess it could have been the first example of a spate of "YOLO suicides" that are gonna turn The Daily Mail rigid with fear and remorse, but it was probably just a guy having too good a time at too fast a speed.

An even more disturbing example of people saying things they really shouldn't on Twitter concerns the Chicago hip hop wars going on right now. Sixteen-year-old Chi-Town MC and sworn enemy of "biggest thing in the game right now" Chief Keef was shot dead on September 4th, the latest in a long line of gang related murders in a city at war with itself. 

Shootings like this are a sad fact of underground hip hop and America itself, but the really disturbing part was the open gloating about it on Twitter. His enemies, those showing solidarity with his enemies and quite possibly even those directly involved in the killing took to Twitter to talk openly about what happened.

There's a lot, but here's a few prime examples from people with guns in their display pics:

Now obviously these aren't confessions exactly, but they certainly seem to be admissions of knowing what may have happened. Not exactly Piers Morgan and Gary Lineker trading jibes about hacking, is it?

But enough of the serious stuff. Are the good people of Twitter confessing to their petty crimes with wanton recklessness? Or are people consulting their legal teams before they share their shoplifting and traffic crimes with the world?

The search term "I just stole" turned out some gloating, but not much in the way of breakdown confessionals. I was hoping to maybe trace some of these crimes and hand in the perpetrators like a social media game Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote, but I can't really see any of these making it to court. Let's try something a little more serious.

Hmm, maybe Twitter does have some dark secrets after all.

Follow Clive on Twitter: @thugclive

By Clive Martin 8 months ago Tags: twitter, confession booth
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