Internet trolling is what comedian Ben Palmer does best.
He has Facebook pages set up for everything – from Waffle House to the City of San Francisco. You may have heard of one of his projects, called “Hope That Helps,” in which he posts snarky responses to customer service requests and complaints.
His most recent stunt blew up, so to speak, when Palmer created a Facebook event to implode Stone Mountain. It garnered thousands of shares and responses, both negative and positive, before Facebook deleted the event and shut down his parody City Of Atlanta page.
“People were upset enough to use Facebook’s tools to mark [the event] as terrorism, to mark it as unsafe or dangerous,” Palmer says.
This comes as national conversation continues over whether to remove or preserve Confederate monuments, including the carving on the face of Stone Mountain.
“The mountain, to actually blow it up, I mean, that thing’s been there a long time,” Palmer says. “It’s ridiculous to think you could actually do that. That’s where the joke is.”
Though the event was created as a joke, Palmer says that he actually hoped people would still show up on the date.
“It would be fun if that event would have been able to stay up and people would have been able to actually get a laugh out of it,” he says. “Maybe show up to Stone Mountain as a joke with some popcorn to watch the ‘implosion.’ And then more and more people would talk about it and maybe it’ll gain some traction to actually take the steps toward whatever it’s gonna take to get the Confederate monuments taken down.”
“I like to make jokes,” Palmer explains, “but the jokes I make are ideas that I want to be real.”
As of now, Palmer has created a new “City of Atlanta” page, complete with an event for a “Stone Mountain Reconstruction,” inviting people to attend a redesign of the carving as a “large peach.”
