tweetzkrieg

I try and avoid posting about brand-new neologisms. They often disappear before they become established, and I don’t want this site to be a graveyard of failed words. (Maybe someone should start such a site, but this isn’t it.) In 2019, when I originally penned the entry for tweetzkrieg, it had been circulating for ten years and had recently broken free of Twitter and started to appear in the mainstream press. I thought it was here to stay, but it faded from use shortly after I first wrote about it. And since Twitter has become X and tweet has lost its cachet, it’s unlikely to be revived. So now that it has popped up in my revision cycle, this entry is something of an obituary.

Tweetzkrieg is an alternative name for what is more commonly called a Twitterstorm, a flurry of activity about a trending topic on the social media platform Twitter. But unlike a Twitterstorm, which can be an unorganized response to a tweet or news item, a Tweetzkrieg is often deliberately generated by a single person or group. Tweetzkrieg is, quite obviously, modeled on blitzkrieg, the German WWII-era strategy of a combined arms assault using infantry, armor, artillery, and airpower. The word isn’t terribly common, but it has been around for over ten years.

Tweetzkrieg dates to at least 16 April 2009 when Kemi Adesina Wosu tweeted this (tweet no longer available):

@basseyworld OMG ur little tweetzkrieg (patent pending on that word snitches!) has me LOLing over here!

On 1 March 2011 the website Cycleboredom.com defined the term:

Actually, I think most of the damage was due to lost feeds and the Tweetzkrieg. If you’ve never watched a cycling race with the obligatory Twitter chaser, then you’re a sad individual lost in the purgatorial land of GeoCities. The Tweetzkrieg is the running commentary on Twitter as a race is unfolding.

The term had moved into the realm of international politics a year later on 29 May 2012 in this tweet by David Rothkopf (tweet no longer available) about a Russian government Twitter assault on the U.S. ambassador to that country, Michael McFaul, in response to a speech he had given:

Russian tweetzkrieg on McFaul uses new media to show how unready they are for new media/political reality

And, of course, Tweetzkrieg is often associated with Donald Trump, as in this 10 January 2016 comment on the website Talking Points Memo about an article that stated an Iowa poll had Senator Ted Cruz ahead of Trump in the race for the Republican nomination for president in that year:

Cue the Trump Tweetz-krieg [tm].

Or in this 17 January 2017 post on the blog Blckdgrd in the days leading up to Trump's first inauguration:

One week from now, holy the fuck — hell, they could Reichstag the Inauguration and declare Martial Law by sunset. The Executive Orders he farts the first 48 hours (with full Tweetzkrieg). I’ll still find these the most fascinating, compelling political times of my life.

And the use that brought the term to my attention was in the pages of The Atlantic on 29 June 2019 in an article by Andrés Martinez:

The June 7 deal may seem to amount to a big victory for Trump, the result of a Tweetzkrieg threatening to impose tariffs on Mexican imports unless Mexico agreed to accomplish within 45 days what the U.S. has failed to do for years: “to sufficiently achieve results in addressing the flow of immigrants from Central America to the southern border.”

As of this writing, the last tweet that used the word tweetzkrieg was posted on 2 June 2021.

Sources:

C-Huller. “MWBASS: I Got Some Kuurne in My Ompoop.” Cycleboredom.com, 1 March 2011. Archive.org.

dr_coyote. “Discussion: Cruz Takes Lead Over Trump in Latest Poll from Iowa.” Talkingpointsmemo.com, 10 January 2016.

Martinez, Andrés. “Did the U.S. and Mexico Just Link Their Immigration Policies?” The Atlantic, 29 June 2019.

@OhioBaylorFan. Twitter.com (now X.com), 2 June 2021.

“Skin Needs a Cut Before It Heals.” Blckdgrd (blog), 17 January 2017.

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, 1942. Wikimedia Commons. Deutsches Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-218-0504-36. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license.