Tom Hanks And The Celebrity Status Pass

I'm not a big user of social media, but the other day I ended up on Twitter. More specifically, on Tom Hanks' time line, where peoples tweets show up if they mention in their tweet anything relating to Tom Hanks. From the time line I clicked through to Tom Hanks' Twitter account, and while the first thing to surprise me was wow, he's got over 15 million followers, the second and main sticking point was how ridiculously weird, bland and boring his tweets were. Check out one of his latest masterpieces below. If you can't see it, disable your Adblocker or tracking protection.

Manhattan Still Life. Hanx pic.twitter.com/JLh5yLnvBf

— Tom Hanks (@tomhanks) September 7, 2018

His tweets mostly consist of pictures of lost / misplaced items, like gloves, socks and shoes. All of the images have some wording accompanying them, like a caption. Mostly along the lines of - Who's sock is this, where's the foot.. He seems to have some kind of obsession with lost items. All very odd. But the strangest thing about all this is that each tweet he posts, no matter how unbelievably strange and meaningless, gets thousands of likes and retweets. Why is that.. He's a celebrity of course, and he has the Celebrity Status Pedestal Pass.

What's going on?, London via /r/Graffiti https://t.co/qBn95aMiYs #Graffiti #Streetart #urbanphotography #graffitiart pic.twitter.com/DyeLEhvXBK

— Urban Diode (@UrbanDiode) September 20, 2018

If a non-celebrity posted those exact same tweets they wouldn't receive not one like or retweet and would probably get labelled as a bit of a weirdo. Well perhaps the "normal" non-celebrity would get one or two likes from a few friendly sympathisers, I mean followers, but that's about it. Hanks, or Hanx as he calls himself, gets thousands. With 15 million + followers I suppose the percentage rate of his engagement is low in comparison.

But I'm shocked that what he posts even gets a few hundred likes from millions of followers. It's only because of who he is perceived by the public to be, a film star, that people just like or retweet for the sake of it. He could probably post a tweet of himself killing a helpless animal, setting an old granny's hair on fire with a blowtorch, or throwing someone off the top a building and it would get thousands of likes. Looking at the rate of engagement his silly tweets get, nothing would surprise me. Actually, come to think of it, that's actually classed as entertainment these days. My bad. - Interwire