“Learn to Code”: The Twitter Meme Attacking Media | The Ringer

Last week, more than 1,000 jobs were eliminated at publishers including BuzzFeed and Verizon-owned Yahoo/AOL. Beginning Friday, Twitter was flooded with messages from freshly laid-off journalists, as well as condolences from their former colleagues. Media Twitter was simultaneously mourning the vicious cutbacks and condemning the VC publisher culture that necessitated them.

Many people retweeted requests for work, lauded the talents of the unfairly fired, or criticized BuzzFeed for its poor handling of the situation. But there was one frequently tweeted phrase that stood out from the sympathy: “Learn to code.”

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What sounds like innocuous career advice is, in many cases, part of targeted harassment. The phrase “learn to code” was added to Know Your Meme four days ago, where it’s described as “an expression used to mock journalists who were laid off from their jobs, encouraging them to learn software development as an alternate career path.”[…]