Stephen King really, really hates Twitter, apparently

Well this is awkward. Stephen King — a notable tweeter — really, really hates Twitter, apparently.

On Tuesday night, the horror author appeared at the 2018 PEN Literary Awards, where he was receiving the PEN Literary Service Award. Each year the accolade is given to a critically acclaimed author of free speech, and King graced the stage to both accept the speech and advocate for the power of books.

In his speech, Stephen King thanked everyone from his editors at Simon & Schuster ("I'm surrounded by good women at Simon & Schuster ... they've all helped make me a better person") to the student activists and shooting survivors from Parkland, Florida, who were also being honored in the ceremony, "for their fierce advocacy and hard work in the wake of yet another school shooting."

And that's when he dropped it, a brief lil' roast of everyone's favorite microblogging site Twitter. Or as Stephen King called it "the intellectual dead zone known as Twitter where clear thinking and kindness is too often replaced by schoolyard taunts. And not to mention, bad spelling and bad grammar."

Ouch.

The roast came as King delivered basically an extended IRL subtweet to Donald Trump.

"The percentage of readers is relatively small compared to the population as a whole," he said. "Just think for a minute of all the people you see on these streets every day staring at their phones or with earbuds in their ears. Then think of how few of them are staring at a printed page instead." (Okay, that's a little "old man yells at cloud" but to each their own.)

Then King moved on to talk about the power of books.

"Reading is powerful. From my earliest days working as a high school teacher, I've been telling kids: those who can read can learn to write, and those who can do both will eventually succeed in the world. Readers learn to be fair and writers learn to think."

"They are the crucial counter weight to those who are close minded and mean spirited. Toop many of those are currently in positions of power," King said. And the best place for those people to express their "poverty of thought," King says, is Twitter.

Of course, it's not a far jump to conclude that one of those people in power King alluded to is the President of the United States. After all, the author frequently roasts Trump on Twitter. Also, everyone from Morgan Freeman, who presented King the award to Margaret Atwood to PEN CEO Suzanne Nossel also mentioned Trump in their speeches at the gala.

Still King's brief roast of Twitter is a little awkward considering PEN's history with the platform. In 2014, then-CEO of Twitter Dick Costolo actually won the 2014 PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Digital Freedom Award for his work with Twitter. At the time, literary foundation praised the platform's ability to amplify voices and free expression around the world.

Further complicating King's Twitter snark was the literary organization's simultaneous celebration of the Parkland student activists Cameron Kasky and Sam Fuentes, and D.C. gun control student activist Zion Kelly who have used Twitter not as an intellectual dead zone but as community building tool for advocacy.

Fortunately for digitally savvy Stephen King fans, the jab at Twitter doesn't mean that King is leaving the platform — the morning after the gala, King memorialized the event with, you guessed it, a tweet.

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