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Who Is 'Eve Fartlow'? The Disparaging Nickname And Controversy Surrounding Eve Barlow Explained
This morning, several Twitter users awoke to find "Eve Fartlow" trending on the platform. For some users, this was a blast from the past — 2021, to be exact, when "Eve Fartlow" first entered the lexicon.
The reason for this concerns Eve Barlow, a journalist and outspoken Zionist, who had voiced her take on the Israel-Hamas conflict with a doozy of a hot take that catapulted her into the status of Twitter's Main Character for the day in the eyes of many users.
In case you're completely lost on this whole thing, here's the history of the name "Eve Fartlow," and how it returned to social media today.
How Did The Nickname "Eve Fartlow" Start?
Eve Barlow is a music journalist and outspoken supporter of Israel. In May 2021, amidst a crisis between Israel and Palestine, Barlow made several tweets in support of Israel, and on May 24th, put out a widely mocked tweet saying her Jewish friend supposedly panicked after reading a "Free Parking" sign and mistook it to read "Free Palestine."
In response, dozens of Twitter users replied with the "devastating" burn, "Eve Fartlow." That grade school-caliber insult appeared in droves, and two days later, Barlow published a piece in Tablet Magazine that made "Eve Fartlow" sound like a grave, anti-semitic attack. She described it as a "social media pogrom." The dictionary defines a "pogrom" as "an organized massacre of helpless people, particularly Jews."
"I don’t know who crafted the first tweet that simply said 'Eve Fartlow,'" she wrote, "but whoever it was – bot or human – started a fire. Over the past two weeks, Twitter has been littered with the words 'Eve Fartlow.' Every time I tweet, this title is the response I attract, and it is pelted at me irrespective of what I write. Hundreds of trolls, some with blue ticks and some without, just start responding to me 'Eve Fartlow.'"
While Barlow may have been using "Eve Fartlow" as a humorous example of the sort of backlash she'd received online for her support of Israel, the damage was done, as her first paragraph cemented the idea that she was melting down because people were calling her "Eve Fartlow," which, in an example of the Streisand Effect, only encouraged her critics to keep using it.
For the record, the first person to say "Eve Fartlow" was in fact a person and not a "bot." It was user @SAMOYEDCORE who coined the nickname on May 13th, 2021.
Why Has "Eve Fartlow" Returned?
While the term stuck around beneath her tweets over the following few years, it didn't return to the "Trending" tab until October 2023 when Barlow voiced some contentious takes regarding the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict.
It seems the impetus for the social media pile-on was a pair of tweets in which Barlow stated she could "understand" why ordinary Germans supported Nazis but could not understand why people supported Palestine.
To many social media users who live by the code that you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to" Nazis, the tweet was beyond the pale, and "Eve Fartlow" returned in droves once again.
This time around, Barlow seems not to have commented on the juvenile play on her name trending on Twitter, perhaps learning her lesson from the first time around.
For more information, check out Eve Fartlow on Know Your Meme.
