Twitter Fires Back With #BetterCIATweets

Right now, the Central Intelligence Agency is learning an important life lesson: People never forget. After the CIA made headlines for posting tweets that smack of an old white guy trying to sound hip in front of his teenage nephews, Last Week Tonight's John Oliver encouraged the Twitterverse to offer the CIA tweet suggestions with the hashtag #BetterCIATweets. Obviously, there isn't an ounce of earnestness here (it's John Oliver, after all).

Judging from the #BetterCIATweets that have already been posted, it's clear people took on Oliver's challenge with gusto. Some stick with lighthearted teasing ("Vanilla Ice was one of us. We wanted people to stop listening to hip hop"), while others went for harsher comments about the CIA's reputation for using torture. Regardless of the tone, one thing is clear: People are getting creative with their tweet suggestions.

At least the CIA's Twitter backfire is still mostly in the form of harmless gibes, unlike the serious tone New Yorkers adopted when the NYPD's Twitter experiment blew up in its face. In that instance, Tweeters posted pictures of serious police brutality, along with the NYPD campaign's positive hashtag #myNYPD, mocking the department's naiveté that everyone in NYC was happy with them.

Take a look at the wide spectrum of suggested tweets — are you paying attention, new person hired to tweet for the CIA? (And if you are the same person who tweeted that Tupac joke, then you'd better pay extra close attention.) Although the NSA bears the brunt of the criticism over that whole phone surveillance fiasco, people love to jab the CIA about spying as well.

Of course they were going to reference conspiracy theories surrounding the CIA...

And it was inevitable that there'd be some jokes about classified information.

Tweeters also took the opportunity to take shots at other groups...

And a tweeter posing as a fake CIA social media intern had a message for John Oliver himself (which the CIA is probably considering in real life):

Images: Twitter; CIA