By Doug Gross, CNN
March 2, 2011 11:38 a.m. EST | Filed under: Social Media
Twitter's guidelines call for parody accounts, like @ceoSteveJobs, to be clearly marked as such.
(CNN) -- Twitter has suspended an account mimicking Apple CEO Steve Jobs, suggesting the parody account didn't appear quite fake enough.
The account, @ceoSteveJobs, has more than 800,000 followers; one recent tweet complained that Pixar's "Toy Story 3" should have won Best Picture at the Oscars.
According to TechCrunch, its owner was notified that he needs to change the username for it to be reactivated.
On Wednesday, an attempt to pull up the account produced a message saying the account had been suspended.
The account isn't the only one to mimic Apple's leader, who is currently taking a medical leave of absence. Blogger Fake Steve Jobs, who is actually Newsweek writer Daniel Lyons, has an account with more than 7,400 followers.
Twitter's parody policy states that the micro-blogging site protects its users' free-speech right to create parody accounts, but that they must be clearly marked as such.
"In order to avoid impersonation, an account's profile information should make it clear that the creator of the account is not actually the same person or entity as the subject of the parody/commentary," reads the policy.
Steve Jobs does not have a verified Twitter account.
TechCrunch quotes the owner of the parody Steve Jobs feed, whom they did not name, as saying that Apple complained about the account. At least once, the account has been confused for the real thing -- by England's Daily Mail, which reported a spoof tweet saying the iPhone 4 was going to be recalled.
Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner said in an e-mail to CNN that the company does not "generally comment on alleged user violations."
"Our rules, guidelines and actions tend to speak for themselves," Penner said.
Apple did not immediately respond Wednesday morning to a message requesting comment for this report.
In an e-mail printed by the tech blog, Twitter told the account owner that its name needs to be changed to include a word like "fake" or "parody" before it could be reactivated.
That would take away part of its appeal, the account owner reportedly told TechCrunch. He cited the fake BP Twitter feed during last spring's Gulf oil spill as an example.
"Most parody doesn't blatantly label itself," he said, according to the blog. "That takes away the fun and the magic of it. If @bpglobalpr had been @fakebp, it wouldn't have caught on nearly as fast and might never have been as funny. Once you got the joke, the fact that it felt like it was really coming from BP made it all the funnier."
Credit: CNN (www.cnn.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment