Zombie Boston 2024 Twitter Account Doesn’t Realize It Dissed Itself
The bid to bring the 2024 Summer Olympics to Boston has been dead for nearly six months now. Until Wednesday, the only activity on Boston 2024’s Twitter feed since July 27 was a bittersweet retweet of the United States Olympic Committee’s announcement that Los Angeles would be its hunky rebound, and a few rogue favorites here and there.
In the wake of news that notorious tax dodger General Electric would be moving its headquarters from Connecticut to Boston’s Seaport District, the revenant account posted the latest column from the Globe‘s Shirley Leung, in which she argues that the Olympics, which she vociferously advocated for throughout its brief, troubled existence, can’t hold a candle to the thrill of successfully courting a corporate titan like GE.
Winning @GeneralElectric in #Boston better than the #Olympics via @leung @BostonGlobe https://t.co/dLx8O720wF
— Dream Big Boston (@Boston2024) January 13, 2016
What exactly is Boston 2024 trying to tell us here? It’s not like Leung wrote ambiguously, or her point was lost in some deep fold of nuance. “This is better than hosting the Olympics” are her first seven words, and from there, it only gets worse for the bid she once lauded.
“No controversy over potential cost overruns, or whether taxpayers will be on the hook for billions of dollars. No worries about traffic on Southeast Expressway, or whether an aging T can handle throngs of visitors. No collective handwringing over whether the pain of throwing what amounts to a three-week party would be worth it all,” she writes.
The big question here isn’t whether Boston 2024 read Leung’s column before tweeting it (and even still, the headline isn’t exactly flattering), but rather, who is still running that account? Bid organizers announced in late September that it had at last settled its millions and millions of debt. So perhaps someone with Boston 2024’s login info is going around liking tweets like this one pro bono.
BREAKING: USOC formally names @LA2024 as the U.S. bid to host @boston2024's sloppy seconds.
— Bobby Main (@bobbyjmain) September 1, 2015