#NiggerNavy

About

#NiggerNavy is a hashtag used to mock a typographical error tweeted by the @YahooFinance Twitter feed, in which they mistakenly posted the word “nigger” 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 nigger 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 #NiggerNavy,^[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 ‘Nigger 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 nigger 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