"Diane in 7A" Livetweet Hoax

Overview

“Diane in 7A” Livetweet Hoax refers to an in-flight feud that purportedly took place between Elan Gale, a producer of ABC’s reality TV series The Bachelor, and a female passenger only identified as “Diane” on Thanksgiving Day. During the course of the flight, Gale began live-tweeting his passive-aggressive encounter with the woman, which instantly went viral on Twitter over the holiday weekend, though it was soon revealed to be a hoax entirely staged by Gale.

Background

On November 28th, 2013, Elan Gale, a producer for ABC’s reality dating show The Bachelor, began tweeting^[1] about a woman allegedly complaining about her delayed flight schedule on an airplane.

Our flight is delayed. A woman on here is very upset because she has Thanksgiving plans. She is the only one obviously. Praying for her
— elan gale (@theyearofelan) November 28, 2013

During the course of the flight, Gale approached the woman with a handwritten note criticizing her for being self-centered, which immediately triggered a back-and-forth exchange of passive-aggressive remarks between the two (shown below, from left to right), and continued to bring the latest developments in real-time via Twitter.

Notable Developments

On Twitter

Gale’s live-tweeting operation instantly went viral as it happened, and in the following hours, his Twitter following skyrocketed by 140,000 people while his tweets racked up several thousands of retweets and favorites. According to the Twitter analytics service Topsy, Gale’s handle @theyearofelan was mentioned more than 66,000 times and the hashtags #TeamElan and #DianeCanEatMyD were mentioned at least 9,900 times and 4,100 times, respectively. In addition, Gale’s tweets were also compiled into a Storify article titled “This Man is Hilariously Live-Tweeting His Flight-And-Feud With The Woman in #7A,” accruing almost 5.5 million views in less than a week.

Online Reactions

Many on Twitter were in awe of the producer’s willingness to stand up to “Diane” (“you are my hero” tweeted one fan), while others called him a bully (“that’s creepy and sad”). Gale became defensive and even wrote a blog to explain his actions. “I know I can come across as abrasive. I know I can seem harsh,” he wrote. “But what I’ve never done is be unkind to a person in a service position.”

News Media Coverage

By 4 p.m. (ET), BuzzFeed had picked up on the story in an article titled “This Epic Note-Passing War On A Delayed Flight Won Thanksgiving,” and throughout the rest of the day, Elan’s tweets continued to make rounds across many Internet news sites and mainstream news publications, including ABC, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, The San Francisco Chronicle and E! Online, among many others.

Diane’s Rumored Cancer

On the following day, someone claiming to be a cousin of Diane came to her defense by posting a comment in the Storify article, which chastised Gale for harassing a stranger without knowing her circumstances and revealed a shocking detail that their reunion was going to be the last chance for Diane to spend time with the entire family due to her stage IV small cell lung cancer.

Diane is my cousin. I want to thank you for not pressing charges against her for slapping you. She would have been arrested for that, and spending a few days in jail would have been a particularly cruel irony under the circumstances. I am a bit surprised you said you could hear her breathing, because Diane has stage IV small cell lung cancer. This would have been her last Thanksgiving with us. I say “would have” because she did miss her connecting flight. She arrived this morning, having spent the night in a hotel in Phoenix. Admittedly, Diane hasn’t been handling her imminent death very well, but she really was looking forward to being with us and the rest of her family- all of whom were flying in for one last Thanksgiving with her. In her defense, she was very contrite and upset about her behavior on the plane. Certainly everybody wanted to get where they were going, but perhaps she can be forgiven for thinking that her need was more pressing than most. Thanksgiving has always been Diane’s favorite holiday, and her comment about the stuffing is true- she was the “keeper of the family recipe” and all of her nieces were planning to be instructed (one more time) in the mysterious ways of Auntie Diane’s stuffing. Since she missed her connecting flight, this did not occur. We are going to try to get as many of the family together as we can tomorrow, but that is up in the air. The plans were all for yesterday. I wish you had known her before she got cancer. You would have loved her. She was bright, funny, and compassionate, and had a self-deprecating sense of humor. She taught elementary music. She loved kids. She loved to laugh. She was everybody’s favorite aunt. Actually, she still is.

Hoax Revealed

Then on December 2nd, Elan Gale tweeted a picture of an empty chair with the message “Here is Diana sitting in a chair,” implying that the woman he tweeted about had been an elaborate scheme.