Noted regional social media figure lauded for starting most angry yet insignificant trending campaign

DUBAI: A highly regarded social media personality is being lauded with starting one of the most angry yet highly insignificant trending campaigns in Twitter’s modern history.

Jenaa Wotameen, who manages to maintain an active blog and Facebook page alongside his contributing duties to The Huffington Post, yesterday morning discovered a phallic-shaped butternut squash while shopping in his local Dubai grocery. Understandably outraged, Wotameen went online to voice his anger, posting a photo of the offending vegetable to his 50,000-plus followers on Twitter.

By 11am, the photo had been retweeted over 5,000 times, and Wotameen’s #stoprudeshapedvegetables hashtag had become the region’s top Twitter trend, a position it was to hold for the remainder of the day.

Wotameen’s photo was later joined by hundreds of similar amateur shots of vegetables that looked vaguely like body parts posted by likeminded individuals from across the region, many of whom had taken to their nearest supermarkets to track down such offensive produce and, in one unfortunate incident, destroy them.

“Its [sic] abslutely [sic] disgustting [sic] that shopps [sic] can sel [sic] this culturaly [sic] insensistives [sic] filth, especcailly [sic] at this timme [sic] of yer [sic]”, messaged one Tweeter, clearly too incensed to check his spelling, who included a photo of a suggestive-looking parsnip.

“It’s so distasteful, I’m distasted!” posted another.

Fierce debate raged until early afternoon between members of the Twitter community regarding what exactly constituted a rude-shaped vegetable, with deep divisions drawn out between those who believed all root vegetables should be removed from shop shelves immediately and others who thought experts should to be sent into each grocer to inspect levels of potential rudeness. A breakaway group argued that the actual offense was caused only by those believing the vegetable to be offensive, therefore putting the blame squarely on the offendee.

Conservative estimates put the number of messages posted throughout the day regarding the subject at around 15 million, with social media experts at Istanbul-based @@Urk Solutions suggesting rude vegetables were “at one point driving up to 45 per cent” of Twitter’s overall traffic across the GCC.

Many food stores have since admitted that they had been the target of thousands of vitriolic comments urging them to remove their stocks of butternut squashes, courgettes, cucumbers, parnsips and carrots.

Unfortunately for Wotameen and his growing legion of supporters, not a single shop has so far been forced into activity.

“To be honest, we couldn’t give a flying monkeys about what is said or not said on Twitter,” claimed one grocer in Abu Dhabi. “I mean, have you seen the sort of mindless idiocy people bicker about on there? A guy last week wanted to ban cats.”