Adam Baron is a reporter, analyst and visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations who has been tweeting and writing about the Middle East, particularly Yemen, for more than eight years.
So he was surprised to discover his Twitter timeline blowing up like never before this week due to a tweet about … Drew Barrymore.
"About two to three hours in, it went absolutely insane," he says of his now-viral tweet showing a "surreal" magazine interview with Drew Barrymore in Egypt's inflight magazine Horus.
"My Twitter timeline is death and destruction," the reporter told The National. "I guess now it's death, destruction and Drew Barrymore."
Here is the picture of the reportedly fake - or at least terribly translated and patched together - interview:
As Baron rightly points out, his Twitter timeline and Google news results have been jam-packed with interesting foreign stories for many years now, but it took Drew Barrymore to make him go, for want of a better term, 'viral'.
To make a statement, he has since been responding to all of the tweets about Barrymore with his more serious stories and tweets.
He says that one unwelcome side effect of the tweet's success was that some took it upon themselves to, "talk crap about Egypt, which I thought was disgusting and it was obviously not my intention at all. I love Egypt,” he told us.
Adam Baron:
More on the truly infamous magazine spread
The article, riddled with misspellings and grammatical errors, led with a description of Barrymore as "being unstable in her relationships" and quoted her as saying that motherhood was "the most important role in my life."
In an interesting twist, Egypt's national carrier is standing by the story, and have now publicly thanked author Aida Tekla for "the clarification" in which she claimed the interview was indeed real and took place in New York.
So, what inspired him to send said tweet, which is now well and truly world news? "The photos of Miss Barrymore that accompanied this piece were initially what really drew my eyes to it," Baron told us. "It looked like what could have been a surreal photo of Drew Barrymore holding a copy of Horus magazine and I started reading it and the first two lines are just mind-blowing."
The first two lines he mentions read: "Despite being unstable in her relationships most of her life, despite the several unsuccessful marriages and despite the busy life of stardom that dominated her life for several years; the beautiful American Hollywood actress has recently decided to temporary take an unlimited vacation to play her most crucial role as a mother."
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Read more:
Snapshots of imamate highlight Yemen’s still unresolved history
A day in Sanaa reveals the state of Yemen's national dialogue
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