Rapper Meek Mill started a Twitter fight with Drake last week, only to see social-media users overwhelmingly side with Drake. It seems he forgot that fights result in winners and losers — and Meek Mill wasn't prepared to be the latter.
This feud is a master class in how to attract negative attention and turn yourself into a laughing stock online. Meek Mill might have thought starting a fight with the more popular Drake would bring him more attention — and it did. It's just not the right kind of attention.
It began on July 21, when Meek Mill accused Drake of not writing his own lyrics:
Since then, the feud has escalated, with radio DJs, music producers, and even the alleged ghostwriter Quentin Miller stepping in — mostly to defend Drake, not Meek Mill.
But through it all, Drake apparently learned from Taylor Swift's Twitter misstep last week and chose not to respond on social media — leaving Meek Mill to keep digging himself deeper and deeper while Drake takes the high ground.
But crucially, that doesn't mean Twitter has forgotten the incident.
Fans are tweeting about the fight nonstop, clamoring for more developments.
Instead of obliging them with a tweet, Drake released two songs mocking Meek Mill. Music fans went wild as he took Meek Mill to task for failing to "give the world" to his fiancée, Nicki Minaj, who is a much more critically and commercially successful rapper than Meek Mill is.
But even though Drake has refused to engage online, the most entertaining part of this feud remains on Twitter and Instagram.
Drake will not tweet back at Meek Mill, but hip hop fans are doing it for him — and hilariously.
Meanwhile, Meek finally struck back with a diss track — in the form of a painfully unfunny fake song on Twitter.
In the court of public opinion, it's clear that Drake came out on top of this fight.
Meek Mill is a victim of a common Twitter misstep for big brands and celebrities — tweeting too much when the public isn't on your side.
Meek's charge that Drake uses a ghostwriter was roundly shot down by other people in the hip-hop industry, so he picked the wrong thing to beef about on Twitter. Then, when social-media users caught wind that he was on the wrong side of the feud, they ran wild, circulating memes that mocked him. Meek can't blame anyone but himself and his itchy "Twitter fingers" (Drake's words) for this giant mess.
Now the situation has snowballed. It is reminiscent of the NYPD's ill-fated attempts to get the public on its side with the #myNYPD hashtag — which quickly turned into a place for people to post photos of overly aggressive officers.
It also comes on the heels of Minaj's own Twitter feud with Taylor Swift — in which Minaj prevailed, because more people sided with her, after Swift made the mistake of inserting herself into the wrong side of a conflict.
The lesson here is not that surprising: If someone starts a Twitter fight with you, it's best to take it offline.
