The Worst Twitter Account On Earth

Meet @jamesholmesdies, a hideous representation of the very dumbest segment of Twitter culture.

Twitter has done a lot for comedy: it's given pro comedians a new way to get famous; it's given non-comedians a chance to show how funny they can be; it's led to the creation, I think, of new and native types of humor.

But you can't talk about comedy on Twitter without talking about some of the worst, and most popular, humor accounts. Accounts like @Lord_Voldemort7 and @FillWerrell and @MensHumor, which have turned bizarre unofficial celebrity identities, old and often pointlessly offensive jokes, bald appeals for retweets and recycled text from popular memes into massive Twitter followings.

Whether or not they're funny is a matter of taste, I guess, but there's certainly something unseemly about them — their pathological pandering, their lack of recognizable personality, their propensity for reposting material without attribution. But none are quite as bad as @jamesholmesdies.

1. It's a fake account created to take advantage of an actual, horrible tragedy

2. The only picture it's posted is a real photo of a man with his head blown of, with the caption "RT if this is how i should die."

3. The majority of its other Tweets are lifted from the popular "Bad Luck Brian" meme. Even without the gross context, these don't work as tweets or standalone jokes; a lot of them didn't even work as photo captions in the first place.

4. According to its bio ("Business: JamesHolmesDies@hotmail.com") it's looking to somehow make money from this.

5. It's very popular, with more than 40k followers after barely a week in existence. It's grown by nearly a thousand since I found it yesterday, while doing a Twitter search for news about his court appearance. This account is only giving Twitter users what they desire, in other words.

Ha.

I've emailed the "business" email address and haven't yet heard back. These kinds of accounts usually try to to monetize with advertisements and merch, but it's hard to imagine something like that working for a murderer-themed handle. There's some cross-promotion in the feed, though, which means this account may simply exist to funnel followers to other bottom-scraping, but likely more marketable, humor accounts. Or as an odd (but effective!) troll.

At least it's not a fan account.

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