About

#NierNavy is a hashtag used to mock a typographical error tweeted by the @YahooFinance Twitter feed, in which they mistakenly posted the n-word instead of "bigger" in early January 2017.

Origin

On January 5th, 2017, @YahooFinance posted a link to a news story with the description "Trump wants a much n* navy: Here's how much it'll cost" (shown below). Approximately 45 minutes later, the tweet was deleted.

Spread

That evening, /r/BlackPeopleTwitter^[3] moderator Dawood16 stickied a screenshot of the tweet to the top of the subreddit. Shortly after, @YahooFinance^[4] tweeted an apology for the spelling error (shown below).

Meanwhile, Twitter user @JeSuisDawn^[6] launched the hashtag #Ni**erNavy,^[5] leading other users to adopt the hashtag in tweets mocking the typo (shown below).

On January 6th, BuzzFeed^[1] published an article about the online reaction to the tweet titled "Black Twitter Roasted Yahoo Finance After The 'Ni**er Navy' Typo Tweet." The same day, Redditor Wrathchild89 posted a picture of a woman sitting on a chair while scuba diving underwater with the caption "when your man in the ni**er navy and he ain't texting back" (shown below, left). In 13 hours, the post received more than 2,500 votes (97% upvoted) on /r/BlackPeopleTwitter.^[7] Meanwhile, Redditor bagdar submitted a Spongebob Squarepants image macro featuring the character Squidward watching Spongebob and Patrick frolicking outside to /r/blackpeopletwitter,^[2] where it gained over 5,200 votes (92% upvoted) and 170 comments within 8 hours.

Search Interest

Not available.

External References