And Then There Was The Time PhillyMag Posted About Zoe Strauss’s Personal Photos And It Got Linked On Drudge And Then Crashed PhillyMag
So: Last week, Zoe Strauss and her spouse were invited to the White House for a special LGBT event. As you can imagine, it was a big deal for both. As you can also imagine, Strauss, being both a photographer and a person who does not get invited to jam with POTUS everyday, went snapshot crazy. Anyone would. Also, being a person of this age, she posted said snapshots to Facebook. Some were sweet, such as the ones of Strauss & Spouse embracing outside the White House; others were funny, such as the ones where Strauss was flipping the bird to the White House portrait of Ronald Reagan. A lot of people saw these photos, and they all had one thing in common: They were friends of Zoe Strauss. They understood that this was a thing between friends, and that, yes, in the wrong hands, this could make a giant kerfuffle, but whatever. We’re all friends, right? Right?
Wrong. This morning, PhillyMag, because they have no soul, posted about the photos, and the reaction was exactly what you would expect. Within hours, the headline you see above appeared on The Drudge Report, with a link to Victor Fiorillo‘s piece on the matter. Here is where a higher power, more just and lovely than we could ever imagine, intervenes: The resulting traffic of foaming-at-the-mouth closeted neocons crashed PhillyMag’s website, forcing old Drudgy to link to a cached version of the story, resulting in zero future hits for PhillyMag. That’s right: What could have arguably been PhillyMag’s biggest traffic day ever, spiked on their own petard. For so it is written, and so it shall be: Philadelphia Magazine, you cannot have nice things. Because you have no motherfucking idea what nice things even are.
UPDATE: After nearly 100 comments — some voicing support for Zoe and others including some of the more vile hate speech we’ve ever found ourselves in the awful role of policing — we have reluctantly decided to close comments on this post. Regular readers will know that this is generally not how we roll, but in the end, an angry, utterly disgusting mob made the decision for us: Nothing new was being added to the discussion. To commenters new and old who came and left thoughtful remarks, we thank you and invite you to stick around. To those of you who came here to spout hate and Limbaugh talking points, all we can say is: Thank God Philadelphia is not part of your America.
