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While You Watched The Super Bowl, Two Major Automotive Journals Had A Twitter Dick Swinging Contest

by Gregson Mathe 6 February, 2017, 10:37 am 835 Views 1 Comment

Twitter is a really strange and odd place. Telling someone to have intelligent thoughts in 140 characters or less is an almost impossible ask. It’s why Twitter is where you go for the best snark around. It’s the one-liner capital for all of humanity. I tweet (@GregsonMathe), Shifting Lanes tweets (@ShiftingLanes), and my three colleagues tweet (Hansen – @evodrivin, Chad – @Chennedy83, & Chris – @write4drives). It’s just another form of social media, but there’s something that is very alluring in being the smartest and wittiest person on Twitter. In the age of the short attention span we all crave the validation.

Motor Trend tried to be just that last night and, in my estimation, failed miserably at it. Below is an actual tweet the Motor Trend Twitter account sent out in response to a fan tweeting at them. This is an unedited screen shot (in case it’s taken down), but here is the link to the original tweet.

At face value, this was Motor Trend’s attempt at being snarky and witty. And yes it was a joke. The problem is it didn’t fall on deaf ears and given the current state of half the country’s opinions on women’s equality, in any aspect, this was poor timing and in poor taste. Others took notice including many in the automotive world like Jalopnik Editor in Chief, Patrick George.

https://twitter.com/bypatrickgeorge/status/828404351496503296

Welcome to the Motor Trend vs. Jalopnik Twitter war.

Are you the same Patrick George that floated us your resume via one of our editors?

— motortrend (@MotorTrend) February 6, 2017

Burn!

https://twitter.com/bypatrickgeorge/status/828406851440095233

INFERNO burn!

Thanks for your support! Who do you work for again?

— motortrend (@MotorTrend) February 6, 2017

At this point, former Jalopnik Editor In Chief and current Executive Editor of Publishing Partnerships at Gizmodo Media Matt Hardigree chimed in with a pretty definitive statement.

https://twitter.com/MattHardigree/status/828407967221477376

For those wondering, those are statistics from a website traffic monitoring site named Quantcast, which is very accurate. We use the free service as well. Team Jalopnik seemed to have the last word here as Motor Trend stopped responding to that thread after that.

This isn’t the first time that Jalopnik and Motor Trend have been at each other’s throats. Back when Motor Trend click-baited the world online and in print with their sort of BS Apple Car rendering, Jalopnik responded, calling it Extraordinarily Dumb And Dishonest. This feud likely won’t die down any time soon since neither Jalopnik nor Motor Trend will be folding as a company for a long time. They’re both very entrenched in car culture and their readership keeps them both hyper relevant in a saturated space where traffic and eyeballs are at a premium.

So what can we learn from this? Well, if you’re with a group of your best friends in the world and you make a joke that’s not very politically correct, that seems to be a more appropriate time to say something slightly off color. Those are your friends and they likely know you’re very much joking and a good laugh can be had by all. Maybe, just maybe, if you’re in charge of a(the) social media platform(s) for one of the largest automotive publications in the world, you shouldn’t be tweeting an inference about how women should be subservient to men when football is on? Just a thought.