White Men Can’t Handle Social Media? How Woody Harrelson’s Attempt Went Limp

Posted by Tien Nguyen on February 3, 2012 in Featured, Social Media

In the era of social media, you don’t make just one enemy at a time, you make an army of them.

Take for example Woody Harrelson, who in a few short hours has reached infamy status on Reddit: considered by some the most influential website site on the internet. [1] [2]

Harrelson, who apparently is in the midst of promoting a new movie called Rampart, (and his people) decided to post an AMA (Ask Me Anything) thread on Reddit, which is essentially a venue where anyone with anything interesting  to say take questions from Redditors to answer.

However well intended the attempt was, the end result ended up showing just how unforgiving social media can be.

Instead of answering actual questions, Woody’s (or his people’s) responses were simply there to promote his movie, Rampart–and after just a few responses he ends up leaving.

The real-life equivalent would be if he had thrown a party at his house, invited thousands of fans to join, and then cut off all food and alcohol 5 minutes in–and then made everyone go home.

The nail in the coffin though came on account of the most popular question as voted on by Redditors:

I went to a high school in LA and you crashed our prom after party (Universal Hilton). You ended up taking the virginity of a girl named Roseanna. You didn’t call her afterwards.

She cried a lot. Do you remember any of this and can confirm or have you been so knee deep in hollywood pooty for so long that this qualifies as a mere blip?

Woody’s (or his people’s) response:

First of off, its not true, and second off, I don’t want to answer questions about that. Lets focus on the film people.

Then when facetiously asked why questions not related to Rampart couldn’t be asked, Woody (or his people) replied “i consider my time valuable.”

From there hundreds of new posts have sprung up antagonizing Woody and his (or his people’s) half-assed effort to promote a film to their community.

So was Woody Harrelson unfairly martyred by a community for not spending hours of his time answering questions, particularly one about a sexual encounter he allegedly had–by a community that often feels as if they should be owed the world*?

Perhaps so.

But that’s the lesson to be learned here–any slip up of any sort within an extremely popular community (or even a modest sized one) will receive tons of backlash, fairly or not, and very quickly and dramatically the masses that felt “betrayed” will do all they can to let everyone they know what they’re feeling through inflammatory means at the expense of the betrayer.

The internet is an unforgiving ocean, and users must always be careful of where they’re treading water–for at any time a simple miscalculated move can unleash not just a wave of sharks going after you, but every single one of those sharks’ friends as well.

Or perhaps, as some have speculated, this was part of the entire social media plan all along, where the negative publicity leads to awareness of his new movie, Rampart, coming to theaters February 10th starring Woody Harrelson, and directed by Justin Lin.

*sorry Reddit, I too am one of you, and feel the world owes me as well