Twitter trends are a fascinating way to gauge what a particular country or city may be interested in, at any point of time. And while they can be wholly meaningless at times, on Thursday morning, most trending hashtags seem to lead back to Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg.
For the uninitiated, Thunberg had been one of several influential individuals from across the world who called out the Indian government and voiced support for the ongoing farmers' protest recently. And for a large part of Twitter this was enough to garner her a stream of invective. But Thunberg didn't stop here. Hours after her first tweet, the teenage activist shared a 'toolkit' for the protestors, only to delete it soon after.
As reported by The Free Press Journal earlier, the toolkit had given a detailed plan of action - from tweet-storms to participation in physical protests. The document spoke about agitating on January 26, as well as the flurry of tweets on February 4 and 5.
And the fact that it had suggestions for actions that could be taken even before Republic Day has now convinced many that there is an ongoing "international conspiracy against India". Indeed, many see it as proof that the "farmers’ protest in India were planned before 26th January". And so, #ToolKitExposed has remained a top trending hashtag on Twitter since last night.
Greta however was soon back with a new 'toolkit'. "Here’s an updated toolkit by people on the ground in India if you want to help. (They removed their previous document as it was outdated.)" she explained sharing a new link. Notably, this one was not a Google Drive link, as well as being considerably less detailed.
But while some are willing to give Thunberg the benefit of the doubt, even as others put the topic aside to share the document out of support for the agitators, a large part of social media users are not having it.
For one thing, her once iconic phrase "how dare you" has turned against Greta. No longer a furious rallying cry against politicians unconcerned with climate change, it is now a diatribe against the activist herself for lending support to the protest. Of course there are many piggybacking on the trend to call out Bollywood, the Mumbai Police and more, but that has become par for the course now.
While many have contended themselves with turning the activist's name into a trend by itself, this has not worked out well. Unfortunately, Twitterati's inability to spell has led to a wide variety of last names for Greta, "Thunderberg" being the most popular.
We're not quite sure that Twitter has thought this one through, but 'Bharat Ratna' is also presently a trending topic. As one user on the micro-blogging platform put it, "I Propose Bharat Ratna for Greta : She has literally handed us gold".
