A 22-year-old English woman did a nice thing this past weekend, and naturally it’s come back to bite her in the ass on social media. On Saturday, the woman bought an ice cream for a (crying) little girl who didn’t have money to buy a cone. Then, she made the fatal mistake of tweeting about it.
See, the woman who paid for the girl’s ice cream identifies herself as “vegan blogger” in her Twitter profile, and one dude in particular was not going to let her buy a non-vegan ice cream cone for a child without a public shaming. The Guardian and other outlets have reported that this Twitter user named Anthony posted screenshots of his direct messages with the woman, accusing her of “harming and killing non-human babies” by purchasing a dairy-based ice cream. He then posted a thread of tweets calling on his followers to message her. (How nice of him to state that he does “not want her to be attacked.”) His initial tweet, in which he posts the screenshots, has more than 1,300 retweets.
Of course, that caused the whole situation—which began with a woman buying a kid an ice cream—to become a viral story over the weekend. The woman seems to have kept a fairly level head through this whole thing, saying she doesn’t think it’s against her vegan ideals to buy a dairy-based treat for a child.
The woman and some of her defenders apparently tried to report the male Twitter user’s messages as harassment, but weren’t successful. The message here? Eat what you want, do whatever random acts of kindness you want, but don’t tell the internet anything ever.