While You Were Offline: Some One Direction Punk Just Ruined the Whole World


One Direction member Zayn Malik performs in concert, in New York, Saturday, May 26 2012. (AP Photo/Charles Sykes)
Charles Sykes


Charles Sykes

If the Internet taught us one thing this week it's that it pays to think about domain registrations in advance. Also, if you say or do something stupid on the Internet, everyone will be ready to tell you about it. (But if you don't know that what are you even doing here?) In a week where the world ended for One Directioners and censorship was defeated (well, almost), here is the pick of what you might have missed happening on the wacky world wide web.

Zayn Ruins the World

What Happened: Zayn Malik has left One Direction. It's possible that that sentence might not have made any sense to you, in which case you should read on.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: For a large part of the Internet, the biggest news story of the week was Zayn Malik leaving One Direction, a decision that he's since explained was down to his need to regain control of his life. The resulting wave of emotion flooding the Internet was so overwhelming some news organizations sought to contextualize it for older readers, or even try to explain why social media has changed fans' interaction with pop music as a whole. There were even YouTube supercuts made up of fans' responses (see above).

Twitter, of course, was filled with unhappiness.

Of course, not everyone was convinced:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, mental health charities warned against some of the more dramatic social media responses. It took a day before the rest of the band started responding on social media to what had happened, and even that just seemed tragic to the fans. Short of Zayn rejoining the band, it seems difficult to imagine what will make them feel better any time soon.

The Takeaway: Will Zayn turn out to be a Robbie or a Geri? Only time will tell. Probably as much time as it takes for most of you to realize what the hell we're talking about.

Taylor Swift Does What We Would All Do, Given The Chance

What Happened: Taylor Swift is buying up porn domains, but that doesn't mean she's planning on extending her conquest of the entertainment industry.

Where It Blew Up: Blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Starting June 1, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will expand the number of generic top-level domains (or gTLDs) available to the public—meaning that .com and .net will be joined by new suffixes like .sucks and .deals—and the 1989 singer is apparently already prepared for the world that's coming. She's already purchased taylorswift.porn and taylorswift.adult, launching a raft of excited coverage eager for the clickbait of putting the words "Taylor Swift" and "porn" in the same headline. While what she did was smart, she wasn't unique in this kind of planning ahead; other companies are doing the same thing. Apparently, she wasn't able to buy taylorswift.sucks, however, because it's for sale by a source other than ICANN. She's probably safe, though, because who really thinks that Taylor sucks these days?

The Takeaway: Someone on Taylor's management team is thinking ahead. It'll be interesting to see which other celebrities follow suit—and which ones will have been beaten to the punch by enterprising potential porn moguls.

Ted Cruz May Be Ready For The Highest Office In The Land, But He Clearly Wasn't Ready For The Internet

What Happened: Republican Ted Cruz announced that he was running for president, although a quick Google search might confuse you about that "Republican" tag.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Ted Cruz, the junior US senator from Texas, announced he would be running for president in 2016 this week, but you wouldn't know that if you visited TedCruz.com, which bears the text "Support President Obama. Immigration Reform Now!" Maybe you should visit TedCruzForAmerica.com ... except that site redirects to HealthCare.gov. It turned out that Democratic supporters had registered the domains ahead of time, as well as TedCruz.ca and TedCruz.tumblr.com, much to the amusement of politicos.

It could have been worse, however; at least the other parties who owned TedCruz2016.com and TedCruz2016.org agreed to redirect traffic to Cruz's real campaign page. Except, there was a further problem: Cruz's real site, it turns out, wasn't exactly optimized for security when it came to receiving donations. In fact, it shared a security certificate with a website called NigerianPrince.com, although thankfully there were those ready to reassure people that Cruz was, in fact, not Nigerian. (He was, in fact, born in Canada, which really isn't a joke.) At this rate, it's going to be a very long campaign season.

The Takeaway: Clearly, someone on the Cruz campaign should have taken a lesson from Taylor Swift's team. Hey, maybe TedCruz.porn is available...?

Racism Is Alive and Well and On Entertainment News Sites, Who Knew?

What Happened: Only 30 years after the phenomenal success of The Cosby Show, television is finally waking up to the fact not everyone is white. According to one industry website, that's not necessarily a good thing.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: To the surprise of ... well, everyone, probably, Hollywood news site Deadline published a story arguing white actors are having a hard time of it in TV thanks to the success of shows like Empire and Blackish. The response was instant on social media:

The non-immediate response was sizable, as well, with think pieces pointing out how offensive it was. Deadline has yet to properly respond to the criticism, although its Twitter account retweeted many negative tweets the day after the story ran.

The Takeaway: The whole thing is an impressive amount of wrong-headedness on behalf of Deadline, but it'll be a while yet before we see if there's any real fallout, other than people shaking their heads. If not, who knows? Bigotry to get outrage clicks might be the next big thing.

Make Those Dirty Books Clean with One Simple Censorship App

What Happened: If you've found yourself bothered by people writing things you don't want to read, maybe you'd be interested in Clean Reader, an app that censors books to the satisfaction of even the most restrictive mind.* (*This is probably not true.)

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Clean Reader is an app that allows you to purchase books ... and then remove all the naughty words. Unveiled earlier this month, this week it unexpectedly went viral, with authors arguing against the app and its purpose.

The charge against the app was successful. Clean Reader removed all titles from its online catalog on Friday, ahead of a planned update and relaunch that, the company claims, will "be in response to the feedback we have received from many authors and users."

The Takeaway: We're torn on this, to be honest. On the one hand, our anti-censorship stance had us thinking this is terrible from the get-go, but on the other hand, it's not as if the uncensored books aren't readily available elsewhere. Ultimately, let's just put this in the "Unless You're Amazingly Sensitive, What's the Point of This?" file.

Ask A Silly Question...

What Happened: SeaWorld, in an attempt to convince the universe that it isn't a terrible organization that hurts animals as some would have you believe, told the Internet that it would answer their questions. As you might expect, this turned out to be a bad PR move.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter

What Really Happened: Oh, SeaWorld. Considering the reputation you have, you think you'd know better than to try and repair the damage to your name by inviting questions on Twitter. And yet, apparently not. Predictably, it didn't go well.

The Takeaway: Quite why anyone at SeaWorld would have thought this was, in any way, a good idea is beyond us, but hopefully they've learned their lesson.