Delete Your Account
I was a sometimes listener to the podcast Reply All who has been converted to an always listener because of a recent episode called "Vampire Rules." Often at the end of episodes there's a segment called Yes Yes No, where PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman millennial-splain the internet to their boss Alex Blumberg. In this episode's Yes Yes No, the following tweet is explained.
This imagined conversation is in reference to a real tweet that Hillary Clinton made about Donald Trump. Trump tweeted “Obama just endorsed Crooked Hillary. He wants four more years of Obama—but nobody else does!” And Clinton (or presumably her social media manager) responded with "Delete your account."
"Delete your account" is a relatively common response to someone saying something silly, stupid, or horrible on social media; it's used sometimes jokingly and sometimes in earnest. Vogt and Goldman go on to explain that Clinton obviously wasn't the one who came up with "Delete your account" because she's unlikely to be so fluent in social media slang:
PJ VOGT: the joke of this tweet is that, yes, Hillary Clinton’s, like, social media manager, whatever, wrote the tweet for her. But then, when they, like, report that news to her, in the world of this tweet, she is responding with, like, like a deeper…internet slang vernacular than – than, “Delete your account.”
By the end of the segment, Alex Blumberg can successfully decode this tweet. Here's his interpretation:
ALEX BLUMBERG: So what that means is, it’s – it – uh, it imagines a world in which this conversation took place. The…Hillary Clinton’s social media manager came to her and delivered the news that they had just tweeted, “Delete your account”. And in contrast to the traditional image of Hillary as a stodgy, non-internet-fluent, baby-boomer, this Hillary — in the imagined world of this tweet — is so fluent that she answers fully in internet slang by saying, “Mom. Yas,” which is…another way of saying, “Yes, great job.”
PJ: [laughing]
ALEX BLUMBERG: And then says, “drag him,” which is another way of saying, uh, “pour it on.”
Vogt, Goldman, and Blumberg delve more deeply into the internet slang meanings of mom and dad, and the whole discussion is pretty delightful. The Yes Yes No segment starts about 22 minutes in to the recording if you want to hear it for yourself. I think you probably do if you've gotten this far.