Update (12:50 p.m. EDT; see screencap below page break) | Tynan tweets: "ok, I apologize. to the axe murderers. you tea party guys need to develop a sense of humor. but I doubt it will happen."
You'd expect it from Newsweek or the New York Times, but PC World?
For some reason, Dan Tynan of ITWorld.com and PCWorld.com just couldn't resist working in a gratuitous swipe at Tea Party conservatives in an August 11 article entitled "Facebook's Phonebook Fiasco."
Here's the offending comment in context (emphasis mine; h/t email tipster Glenn Petrucci):
Who are all these people, and what are their phone numbers doing on my Facebook contacts page? That’s the question I am now asking.
I have 987 Facebook friends, some of whom I actually know. A handful of them are on my Android phone. Most, if not all, of the contacts inside my mobile phone are now listed in Facebook – as well as numbers for things like the pizza joint down the street, which doesn’t have a Facebook page.
You know how it goes on Facebook – somebody you don’t know asks to be your friend, you look over their friends list, decide they probably aren’t an axe murderer or a Tea Party member, and you say Yes, because Facebook is a fairly low risk, low maintenance connection. And if they prove to be truly annoying you can always block or defriend them later.
Tynan describes himself as "very liberal" on his Facebook page, so perhaps it's not surprising that he hacked up that snark in his initial rough draft. It's just unfortunate that the professional writer and editor in him failed to exercise restraint before he clicked publish.
It's hardly a smart business move to insult a large section of technophiles who read your publication that happen to be Tea Party conservatives.
Photo of Tynan accessed from his bio page at tynanwood.com.
