Does PETA enjoy the abuse?

On every social media platform, there are four beliefs on which everyone agrees: The world needs more cat content, the world has no need for anti-vaccination advocates, animal cruelty is reprehensible and bacon is delicious.

Deviate from any of these commonly shared views and feel the Internet’s wrath.

Now, every social media platform has its own set of unwritten rules. Twitter has a few, including one to help users understand when they’ve said something stupid. That particular rule goes like this: If the replies to your tweet dramatically outnumber the shares, chances are you mucked up pretty badly.

And, boy, did PETA appear to muck things up this week when it tweeted this:

Goodness. Look at the response-to-retweets ratio. That’s 600 responses to every 27 shares. That’s not even – that’s impressive!

One cannot help but ask whether PETA enjoys the abuse. Surely, they understood what they were getting into with that tweet.

The simple answer is: Yes. Of course the group’s social media manager knew what he was doing when he typed that. PETA is many things, but it’s not obvious. True, they may not be particularly talented in terms of advancing their agenda, but you cannot deny they are masters at grabbing peoples’ attention.

And if grabbing our attention was the goal here with that bacon tweet – and it most definitely was – then mission accomplished.

Hell, I just wrote nearly 300 words about it.