Last week, I decided to do what most guys in their mid-twenties do when they get bored: conduct a semi-elaborate internet social experiment to see how many people I could trick into getting angry at a fictitious person. So I wrote up a shitty, blatantly sarcastic “article” about the health risks of losing a state championship, and why it should be significantly easier for high school athletes to win one—quoting people like “Dr. Bill Brasky from UC-Berkeley” and “Vermont politician Bernard Sanderson.” Then, I made a fake Change.org petition (it takes like 2 minutes) calling for Virginia to double the amount of classifications at its state wrestling championships from 6 (already fucking ridiculous) to 12 (outrageously hyperbolic).

The creator of the petition, or the antagonist of my social experiment, was a fictional mom named Carolyn Ruth whose profile picture was the top Google Image result for “disappointed mom.”

I made the petition the thumbnail for the article because I know roughly 90% of people on Twitter just read headlines and look at pictures, instead of clicking links and reading more than one sentence. The results were interesting.

The conclusion of the study and moral of the story is that if you go out of your way to try to piss off a large amount of people on the internet because you get pleasure from it, you’ll probably succeed, and you’re probably a 26-year-old loser who spends way too much time online.

But if the wrestling community wants a real person to hate, there’s this guy:

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Edit: I’ve received word that some fictional, spoiled college girls also managed to rile up a bunch of people online yesterday.