Michelle Tandler's "Public Lynching" Tweets

About

Michelle Tandler's "Public Lynching" Tweets refers to a suggestion made by San Francisco tech influencer Michelle Tandler that men of the city return to forming vigilante groups to hang criminals, specifically fentanyl dealers, in order to make the city safer. The tweets were harshly criticized, as several commenters speculated that she was advocating for a time when the city's Ku Klux Klan population committed public lynchings. As her tweets and the subsequent controversy went viral, an old TikTok video she made about how to make "cold bubbly water," in which she essentially makes seltzer water with a SodaStream, also resurfaced and went viral.

Background

Prior to her controversial "public lynching" tweets, Michelle Tandler attracted attention online several times for making disparaging tweets about San Francisco. For example, in 2022, she claimed the city's dogs were getting addicted to meth by eating feces laced with methamphetamine, which turned out not to be true.^[2][5]

On April 9th, 2023, Tandler went viral for another series of controversial tweets about San Francisco.^[1] In these tweets, she talked about seeing drug addicts and paraphernalia on the streets of the city and recalled that men of San Francisco used to form vigilante groups to hang criminals. Her tweets appeared to suggest that publically hanging fentanyl dealers would help rid the city of crime (shown below).^[3]

Developments

Michelle Tandler's tweets on April 9th, 2023, were then widely criticized and mocked on social media. For example, that same day Twitter user @MrFengi^[4] suggested that the "vigilante justice" of "100 years ago" that Tandler was praising referred to the Ku Klux Klan's activity in the Bay Area in the 1920s, gaining over 200 retweets and 1,700 likes in two days (shown below, left). On April 10th, Twitter user @wihorne^[6] also interpreted Tandler's tweets as advocating public lynching, noting how her tweets seemed to recall suffragist Rebecca Latimer Felton advocating "lynch a thousand times a week" in a speech (shown below, right).

Following the backlash, Tandler defended herself by saying she did not advocate public hangings but suggested criminal punishment would serve as a deterrent for drug crimes in the city^[7] (shown below).

"Cold Bubbly Water" Video

On April 8th, 2021, Michelle Tandler posted a "how-to" video on how to make "cold bubbly water" to her TikTok. The video features steps such as "put water in the refrigerator" and ultimately she uses a SodaStream (a product designed to carbonate water) to make her "bubbly water." The video gained only 4,000 views on her TikTok in two years (shown below).

In the midst of the controversy surrounding her perceived "public lynching" tweets, Twitter user @elaifresh reposted the video to mock Handler, gaining over 400 retweets, 500 quote-tweets and 7,100 likes in two days (shown below).

After resurfacing, many Twitter users then mocked the video for its simplicity. For example, on April 11th, 2023, Twitter user @samknight1^[8] tweeted, "This would be endearing childlike innocence if you didn’t know that she wants to publicly execute every poor person in Northern California," gaining over 50 retweets and 790 likes in less than five hours (shown below, left). On April 10th, user @barry^[9] joked, "Hold on go slower I accidentally made mustard gas," gaining over 140 likes in one day (shown below, right).

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External References