Kim Stafford: Context Redacted

Kim Stafford is just another example of how social networks like Tumblr, Twitter and Imgur are designed to strip stories of their context and reduce everything to a single line -- or image.

Over a year ago, which in internet-time may as well be a decade, Kim Stafford wrote a Tea Party slogan on a pizza box, and then went to a party. The kegger was Boston Tea Party themed, and since she was invited at the last minute she didn’t have time to procure a tri-corner hat, so a new Tea Party sandwich-board wearing protester was her costume. Little did she know, she’d become a figurehead of hatred before she even got home.

The image, which has probably been seen by hundreds of thousands at this point, was uploaded to Tumblr, without context, and it took off.

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