Dianna Russini returned to Twitter on Thursday, and it didn’t go well

The biggest story in the NFL continues to be the recent photos of, and the denials issued by, Patriots coach Mike Vrabel and New York Times reporter Dianna Russini.

Everyone is talking about it. Most of the people who cover sports media have written about it. Even NBC News had an item about it.

Reasonable minds differ on what the photos show, and what they don’t show. A significant question lingers as to how the photos came to be. Between accident and design, it feels like someone was looking for something.

As mentioned on Wednesday’s #PFTPM, the situation also invites scrutiny of Russini’s past reporting. (Alex Reimer of Awful Announcing has ventured down that specific rabbit hole.) It will impact the reactions to her future reporting.

It also created a practical question as to the right way to assume a business-as-usual presence on social media.

On Thursday morning, Russini authored her first tweet since the situation came to light. It was innocuous; she posted an item that ran a link to an article about the NFL’s ongoing collective bargaining brouhaha with its officials. It felt like a trial balloon.

If so, it fell flat.

The responses were as toxic, mean, and hateful as anyone would imagine, given the toxic, mean, and hateful nature of the Twitter ecosystem. There were, as of this posting, more than 2,300 responses to the tweet.

So what’s next? Given that the job of the NFL insider relies heavily on winning the thumb races to Twitter, it’s going to be hard to abandon the platform. But she may have to.

Yes, things tend to blow over. Collectively, we have the brains of goldfish. In this specific case, however, the facts are sufficiently unique from the typical merry-go-round — and Russini’s job is sufficiently polarizing in nature — to invite the same kind of response to everything she reports from now on.