The slap heard ‘round the world is just about all anybody is still talking about, even a couple of days after the Oscars. If you go on Twitter there will be no shortage of people voicing their opinion about who was in the wrong when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock after a joke at the expense of Jada Pinkett Smith. And a lot of these opinions are being directed at a guy on Twitter named Will Smith, who isn’t actually that Will Smith.
The Twitter handle @WillSmith does belong to a verified account for a guy named Will Smith but he’s not the guy who just won the Best Actor award for King Richard. That hasn’t stopped a lot of people from flooding his Twitter notifications because they’re clearly just assuming that the Twitter account for Will Smith must belong to that Will Smith.
Real talk, I’m not the person you’re upset/happy with. I make podcasts and video games for a living. At the risk of making people pissed off at me instead of that other guy, the world would be a better place if we stopped answering words with violence.March 28, 2022
It seems that the responses to this Will Smith are a combination of praise and frustration. People are pretty well split on who was in the wrong in the Chris Rock/Will Smith slap situation. Or at the very least they are split on who was more wrong. For the record, this Will Smith has some words of criticism for the actor he shares a name with.
The incident took place at Sunday night’s Academy Awards when Chris Rock was set to announce the winner of the Documentary Feature Award. Before getting to that he made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s short hair, which is the result of alopecia. Will Smith took offense and walked up on stage and struck Rock. Smith returned to his seat and two exchanged words from there before things got back to the topic at hand.
To be clear, the actor Will Smith doesn’t have a Twitter account, Smith does most of his personal social media outreach on Instagram. When people look up Will Smith on Twitter, this account is what they find, and since it’s also a verified account, a lot of people probably don’t look closer than that. And people named Will Smith certainly aren’t the only ones who have to deal with this sort of thing. Ask ReelBlend co-host Kevin McCarthy how often he gets tweets that are meant for a U.S. Congressman.
As you can probably guess, this happens to this Will Smith a lot. Back in November on Disney+ day, when the streaming service announced a new NatGeo series starring the Independence Day actor, the official Disney+ Twitter account also accidentally tagged the non-celebrity Will Smith and filled his notifications.
Whatever one thinks of the exchange between Smith and Chris Rock on the Oscars stage, the situation does seem to be calming down. Smith has apologized to Rock as well as to the Academy itself. Chris Rock has also declined to press charges.
