Sources confirmed Wednesday that Mary Keating, an Ann Arbor resident and frequent user of the crowdsourced viral content blog BuzzFeed, was deeply confused when she attempted to react to a trending article regarding the ongoing Congolese civil war in terms of the site’s relevant “Boost” categories, “OMG,” “Eww,” and “WTF.”
“Those really gory pics of the fighter guys in loincloths were pretty clearly ‘Eww,’” Keating confirmed, “but when you look at the ongoing territorial disputes between the Hutu Power and the rebel Tutsis, you get the sense that the geopolitical origins of the whole thing are decidedly ‘OMG.’
“Initially, I was sure that the part about the inadequate reaction from the global community made it totally ‘WTF,’” Keating continued, “but then I remembered that I’d used the ‘WTF’ tag for their story about ‘The 12 Craziest Things Mankind Has Stuffed into Pizza Crusts.’ So you can see why I wasn’t too gung-ho about applying that same label to an ethnically-motivated armed conflict,” Keating added.
The article, which dealt with the ethnic violence arising from the Kivu, M23, and Dongo conflicts respectively, was “truly an enigma” for Keating, who usually considers herself “extremely adept” in responding to the site’s typical content, including “21 Pictures of People Wearing Horrifically Ugly Overalls” and “The Weirdest Picture of Mark-Paul Gosselaar You’ll Ever See,” in terms of the tags “LOL,” “Win,” and “Trashy.” As a result, her confidence in assigning overly simplistic labels to poorly-written yet widely-appealing articles has been shaken.
In a moment of self-crisis, Keating considered actually composing a comment or reading more about the issue, but resisted the urge and “gained back her mojo” after successfully tagging a related story, “21 Red Pandas Who Are Delighted to See You After So Long,” as a clear and unambiguous “Cute.”
Originally published: March 2013
