The tweet-vacuuming outrage-bait Storify listicle has become one of the most tired and lazy crutches of online media. You’re familiar with them from sites like: every site. After something notable happens on Twitter, enterprising young content miners run a simple Twitter search, cherry pick a dozen or two tweets corresponding to the subject at hand, then embed them into a post. Voila! Research.

One recent example on BuzzFeed, somewhat hyperbolically titled “Coca-Cola’s Multilingual Super Bowl Ad Inspired A Complete Meltdown Online,” picked through reactions to the Coca-Cola Super Bowl ad for jingoistic reactions. Really hard-hitting stuff. Sucked into the meat grinder was Twitter user @seanfrederick, a fella that I’m friends with on Twitter and through the Boston bar world. His tweet, as anyone who follows him online would have instantly known, was ironically echoing the type of knee-jerk Americanism reactions that were flying around at the time.

Coca-Cola and Cheerios have been absolutely disgraceful tonight. #speakamerican #Benghazi — Sean Frederick (@seanfrederick) February 3, 2014

But in the five seconds people spend searching for outrage-bait tweets to compile lists like the one above, context, or user history aren’t considered. And so, Sean Frederick, racist on BuzzFeed.

Frederick has written an open letter to BuzzFeed’s Ryan Broderick, which you can read at the bottom of this article. [Update: Since this article was published, Frederick has received a response from Broderick and BuzzFeed and they’ve agreed to remove his tweet from the post.] I’m sympathetic to his situation, although I’m not sure threatening legal action against a member of the media is something I can endorse all that enthusiastically, or a case that he’d even win. But it does bring up some interesting questions about how this whole thing works now.

Patton Oswalt illustrated just how easy it is for tweets to be taken out of context a while back, by breaking out incomplete thoughts into a series of two tweets at a time. For example, “all abortion should be illegal, no exceptions. Just go ahead and UNFOLLOW me, you right wing hate-mongers” seems pretty questionable, unless you had read the tweet that preceded it in his timeline: “Saying that gay marriage is unconstitutional is as hateful & ignorant as saying.”

Clearly it’s very easy to take people out of context on Twitter. But can you take their words at all? You may remember the case from last year about the journalist who claimed that none of her tweets were publishable.

Are tweets in fact copyright protected? That’s still unclear. Although there are compelling arguments on either side.

In the meantime, I find this sort of conflict fascinating. On the one hand, everyone should know by now that posting a tweet is putting them on the record in front of the entire world, but on the other hand, there’s zero responsibility placed upon anyone doing tweet roundup lists to verify that what the person said was true, or what they actually meant. It’s roughly analogous to the problem with revenge-porn websites. If you don’t want your naked picture on the Internet, don’t take one. But once it’s gotten out, that’s certainly not worth ruining someone’s life over.

I’m also curious why Twitter doesn’t implement a notification that lets users know when your tweet has been embedded somewhere. As a creator of content myself, I’d certainly be interested to know when someone is quoting me, or using my ideas without my permission, or without even acknowledging to me that they’ve done so.

Here is Frederick’s unedited response to BuzzFeed: