Actor Samuel L. Jackson received social media's highest honor for his 74th birthday this week--he trended on Twitter on his big day.
Unfortunately, it was for the sort of thing you don't really want to trend for.
It was not because so many people were sharing an outpouring of birthday love for the actor that the algorithms took notice.
Rather, the actor became a trending topic on the platform because he was caught "liking" hardcore porn on the app, but seemingly didn't realize Twitter "likes" are public.
As you might expect, Twitter wasted no time informing him in the most dignified ways possible.
Jackson has a hefty following on the platform of about 9.1 million people, so suffice to say when he likes something, his followers find out about it.
Many people--Samuel L. Jackson included, apparently--think that when you "like" something on Twitter, you turn its little heart icon red, add a number to the like count and that's it.
But as Jackson learned the hard way on his birthday, each public Twitter profile has a section labeled "Likes" that is a feed of tweets that person had "liked," and it's visible to any user.
Most people probably aren't invested enough in someone's Twitter "likes" that they'd actually go to a person's profile and look them up.
But Twitter's functionality is such that people don't have to be curious--sometimes "liking" a tweet sends it into your followers' feeds. And when you're a celebrity like Jackson with a large following?
Well, your Twitter browsing is even less private than usual.
So it's pretty likely Jackson spent his birthday sending hardcore porn into the feeds of his followers.
And people's responses got real funny, real fast.
At some point, Jackson got the message and began furiously un-liking all the porn—which spawned a whole other round of tweets.
Anyway, we hope Jackson enjoyed his birthday... whatever he got up to.
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