A Conversation with The Bad Tweet Expert

I chatted with Jeremiah Johnson, famous for compiling the worst tweets every year

Welcome to the CHH Conversations series- I’m aiming to do one a week, detailing a person (or people) who belong to an interesting group which is either part of the current zeitgeist, typically unheard, or just something I find super interesting. Note that my interviewing someone doesn’t mean I agree with them or approve of what they say—in fact, I may strongly disagree with many of the people I interview! I do, however, appreciate that anyone gave me any amount of their time, so be nice.

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I spoke with Jeremiah Johnson, writer of Infinite Scroll (subscribe to him on Substack, and follow him on Twitter!) Because his Twitter avatar is of a fictional character named Jeremiah Johnson, I had been operating under the assumption that, like me, he was an anonymous account. But in fact, he isn’t, that’s his real name, and he is the founder of the Center for New Liberalism. He has spent much of the past several years working in center-left politics, writing about policy, and hosting the New Liberal Podcast. And when he’s not thinking about politics, he writes about the social internet at Infinite Scroll and collects bad tweets. Famously, he rounds up the worst tweets of the year, every year, on Twitter.

How did you come up with the idea for the Bad Tweets Bracket? Was there one particular tweet that was so bad, it prompted the idea?

So I'm not 100% sure if this is accurate or not, but I think I may have run the first ever 'bracket' on Twitter back in 2018. That was the 'Chief Neoliberal Shill Bracket', where CNL crowned the Chief Shill of all the very online center-left economists and wonks. I think we were the first people to ever do that sort of thing on Twitter. That's now run every year, and it's always a ton of fun. This is just to say that I've always had brackets in the back of my mind.

What specifically gave me the idea for a bad takes bracket was a tweet from Rebecca Jennings of Vox that asked people for the worst discourse of the year - https://x.com/rebexxxxa/status/1599785761972551680. It was an amazing tweet to dive into the replies and quotes, and I thought "People would love to see this all in a list. Or better yet, to vote on it in a bracket". And a couple weeks later I released the bracket.

What factors do you think go into a tweet winning a bracket? Are certain types of discourse more likely to win over others? What’s your favorite bad tweet?

My favorite genre of bad tweet is the ones that aren't part of some bigger online culture war, that aren't political, they're just bizarre. Singular bad tweets that absolutely nobody could have predicted. For instance:

Some of the greatest discourses we've ever had fall into this category, like Coffee Wife, Bean Dad and Chili Neighbor. Just completely non-political insanity. I think a truly great Bad Tweet has to be a little bit diagonal to the normal discourse. It can't just be another instance of waging the culture war or calling someone a slur or whatever. It has to be weird in addition to being bad, and with a poster who's entirely earnest behind it.

Bracket aside, what subset of Twitter do you find the most fascinating, in a "They're really insane" way?