Aaron Carter may have told us how he beat Shaq, but we don’t really know why he tweets back.
For most Staples students, Nov. 15 was any other Tuesday, with the normal routine of school, sports practice, homework, dinner, and sleep. But for some students, Nov. 15 was not just a regular weekday.
It was the day they would meet a world-famous celebrity.
Or, rather, duel with a world-famous celebrity on Twitter.
Erica Stein ’13, finished with studying for a Pre-Calculus test, decided to check her Twitter account to see if anything was going on. To her amusement, she saw “hilarious” tweets written by various Staples students mentioning pop-singing sensation Aaron Carter. She decided to hop on the bandwagon.
Stein, referencing a lyric in “I Want Candy,” a popular song covered by Carter in 2000, tweeted that Carter cannot “be mean” to the Staples students who were tweeting him “JUST CUZ U NEVER GOT ‘CANDY IN THE MORNING TIME,’” although by that point, there were no tweets sent from Carter’s Twitter mentioning any Staples students.
It only took one more tweet from Stein for Carter to respond. Mentioning Stein, he allegedly tweeted that he was “clearly NOT talking to you.”
Stein would send 32 more tweets to Carter that evening. Carter retweeted only one of them, in which he acknowledged that it came from a “hater.” And while Stein admits that her tweets were written with a malicious tone, she says that they were all jokes, and that she truly enjoys Carter’s music.
“I was just doing it for a laugh,” she said.
The first tweet of the night, which claimed that Carter “sucked,” came from Matt Smith ’13, who said that his tweet was not only written as a joke, but also out of pure fascination of the ability that Twitter gave him to interact with celebrities.
“All of my tweets towards Aaron were all out of a fun spirit,” Smith said. “No one intended on actually getting mad. Carter claims on his page that he ‘loves his fans,’ so he seemed like the most likely celebrity to respond.
However, Smith says that Carter ultimately blocked his account. He alleges that Carter proceeded to send direct messages to Stein and Jarrett Goodness ’13, another participant in the Twitter brawl.
“I was pretty upset that I was blocked, because [Carter’s] responses to Jarrett and Erica were hilarious,” Smith said.
According to Goodness, Carter tweeted that he would “whoop [his] a** on [popular video game series] Call of Duty,” and received a direct message from Carter’s Twitter account claiming that he “must have a little p****.” Rather than taking offense, Goodness says these responses were perhaps the funniest things he has ever seen.
“The fact that Aaron Carter, who used to be really popular when I was little, is now sending me angry tweets is hilarious,” Goodness said. “Personally, I’m honored.”
Although Stein and Smith say that Carter went along with the joke, some of his fans did not acknowledge the humor, and took their tweets to be signs of attack against Carter. One of Carter’s followers tweeted that Smith, Goodness, and Palumbo were “no better than the dog s**t on a homeless man’s shoe.”
Smith shrugged off the backlash, and added that the responses from Carter’s fans were “one of the funniest parts.”
Some Staples students discovered the interaction between the juniors and Carter through their Twitter accounts. Colleen McCarthy ’12, for example, saw some of the tweets on her Twitter timeline.
“No one has heard from Aaron Carter in a while, so it was pretty funny to see him interacting with Staples kids, and also to see his still-dedicated fans backing him up,” McCarthy said. “I figure it was all in good fun.”
In the midst of the duel, Stein, who claims she wanted her Facebook friends to see the action, posted to her Facebook profile a screenshot of a tweet allegedly written by Carter that mentioned her. Many Staples students who do not use Twitter became aware of the interaction by seeing the screenshot of the tweet, which read “@Est3in I clearly was NOT talking to you #haters.”
For example, Will Byrnes ’13, who saw Stein’s screenshot on his Facebook newsfeed, said he was immediately went into a state of disbelief.
“When I first saw the post, I thought it wasn’t real. Turns out I was wrong,” said Byrnes, who described the interaction as amazingly funny.
The day after the Twitter clash, Stein was surprised to see how quickly word had buzzed amongst Staples students.
“I had expected people to know about the situation, but I didn’t expect as many people as there actually were that came up and laughed with me about it,” Stein said. “Considering many people from school follow me on Twitter and saw my post on Facebook, now it makes sense that by the next day, practically the whole school knew about it.”
Henri Rizack ’14 saw a different post on Facebook relating to the Twitter brawl, and found the whole thing “very funny.”
“I was amazed that a couple of high schoolers could get that kind of reaction out of a pop idol,” Rizack said.
Elena Adams ’12, a self-proclaimed passionate Aaron Carter fan, admits that while she thinks the juniors were being silly, she thinks the Twitter altercation will be a memorable part of her senior year.
Since Carter’s rise to fame is commonly associated with the late 1990s, a time during which most current Staples students were children, some say that hearing Carter’s name come up again was nostalgic.
“It’s funny to hear that a pop sensation from my childhood interacted with kids in my grade,” Ariel Greene ’13 said.
