About

Snitch Tagging refers to a widely-looked down upon practice of seeing someone being criticized on social media and then tagging that person in a subsequent comment in the thread so that they see the criticism.

Origin

The term "snitch tagging" was not coined until well after people criticized the practice. An article titled "Stop Tagging Celebrities Into Twitter Conversations" appeared on Birth Movies Death on December 30th, 2013.^[1] In the piece, author Devin Faraci says, "Every now and again, some guy is shit talking me on Twitter and someone else decides to tag me into it. This doesn't ruin my mood or my day, but it's a momentary bummer… Possibly the tagger thinks they're being heroic – 'Hey, look at this asshole! Take him down!' – but they're really just being a snitch." The blog AnotherAngryWoman^[2] wrote about Twitter etiquette on April 5th, 2017, saying "Sometimes, people on Twitter will be snarking about a horrible celebrity. And this’ll happen by the medium of subtweeting. And then someone comes along and is all like 'Yeah! @KTHopkins is a massive turd.' Congratulations, you fucking snitch. You just drew attention of a high-profile celebrity and could expose everyone to a torrent of abuse." On November 18th, 2017, Urban Dictionary user Slangtheheck^[3] submitted a definition for the term (shown below).

Spread

The term began seeing more coverage over the following year, as many publications which cover internet culture, including Mashable,^[4] Cosmo,^[5] and Observer^[6] covered the term and chastised the practice. They cited an example in which a Twitter user snitch-tagged Elon Musk on reporter Noah Schachtman, who said a story about Musk being combative with media was going to be published soon (shown below).

On September 24th, 2019, Daily Dot^[7] reported on the term, citing several examples of people complaining about the practice and saying that anyone they see snitch-tagging gets blocked (shown below).

Search Interest

External References