Celebrities, media personalities and athletes are increasingly being misrepresented in the world of social media.Tony La Russa, manager of baseball's St. Louis Cardinals, is suing the Twitter, claiming that an unauthorized page using his name damaged his reputation and caused emotional distress.
The Philadelphia Daily News recently published comments from Philadelphia Eagles cornerback Asante Samuel's Twitter feed, only to find that his words were being tweeted by an imposter.
Media personality Keith Olbermann also was a victim of Twitter fraud, and CNN recently acquired the rights to CNNbrk (CNN Breaking News), the largest Twitter account on record with 959,011 followers. The account was being administered by James Cox, who is not affiliated with the news station.
This all comes at a time of fierce competition between CNN and Ashton Kutcher to have the first Twitter account with 1 million followers. At the moment, the well known actor has about 941,749 followers and singer Britney Spears is in third place with 926,862 followers.
According to two media experts at Temple University, we should expect more social network fraud, something that local governments should be alert to as they move to embrace these new media tools to communicate with citizens.
Professor Susan Jacobson of Temple's School of Communications and Theater compares Twitter fraud to what happened in the early days of the Internet when regular people would rush to buy domain names (i.e., www.madonna.com) and then sell them to celebrities for millions of dollars.
Although she questions why the Daily News' journalists didn't check their sources, Jacobson notes in a press release: "We are still in the early stages of social media. These situations are bound to continue to happen until laws are enacted that prevent people from misrepresenting themselves. If social media follows the same model as the web, we will continue to see misrepresentations of celebrities on social media sites."
Frank Farley, another Temple expert on risk-taking adds that people would do something like this for two reasons: malicious or near criminal misrepresentation, or just to have fun by carrying out a prank.
"We shouldn't be surprised by this; I'm frankly surprised we haven't seen more of it. Through social media, we have created the capacity or opportunities for people to take such actions. It's the old 'If you build it they will come,'" said Farley.
Image from Jeroen Mirck. CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic
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