The introduction of the new media with great micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter and Facebook has provide an alternate option for people to communicate with others quicker and more effective. Back then, most would be able to communicate with their favourite celebrities through the celebrities’ blogs but with the introduction of Twitter, followers are now able to communicate instantly and efficiently with the celebrities. Most of the people have acknowledged the dramatic growth of Twitter through the numbers of celebrities that have been users of this micro-blogging website (Sciretta, 2009). However, this amazing communication tool has made a drastic turn as there are several celebrity imposters that hack into the celebrities account and send out messages or tweets, on such a way that the followers would believe (Owens, 2009).
Source: (gossipteen.com, 2009)
Due to this, followers would have several question marks and scratching their heads in figuring out whether the message is valid or fake, in some extent followers would also question whether the celebrity is real of fake. In a case, an attacker was able to hack into Disney’s teenage star Miley Cyrus’ Twitter account in which stating and post up a message in which it states that “Miley” hates little kids and she did the acting role for the Disney drama series Hannah Montana for the sake of money (Constantin, 2009; Owens, 2009). This message caused an outburst especially among the Hannah Montana series fans and due to the controversial message being posted on Twitter, Miley Cyrus’ Twitter account was temporarily suspended in which the officials stated that the account was suspended due to ‘strange activity’ (Constantin, 2009).
In an interview with David Letterman, actor Jonah Hill revealed that he did not possess any Twitter account and claimed that the account @OfficialJonah was a fluke (Ostrow, 2009). Jonah Hill also stated that the user of the particular account is an imposter and the user would later claimed that the blog was indeed a fluke and it is not Jonah Hill’s valid account (Ostrow, 2009).
In order to curb these imposters from hacking into the real celebrities account, the Twitter company decided to reduced or somewhat prevent any signs of celebrity imposters with the introduction of ‘verified account’ service (Leyden, 2009). The service is used as a virtual seal to provide verification that the account belongs to the person or a company in order to inform the followers that the person or the particular is valid and not an imposter (Leyden, 2009).
Source: (techshali.com, 2009)
References
Constantin, L 2009, Miley Cyrus’ Twitter account hacked, Softpedia, viewed 9 November 2010, <http://news.softpedia.com/news/Miley-Cyrus-039-Twitter-Account-Hacked-104817.shtml>.
Leyden, J 2009, Twitter fights celeb imposters with Verified Account scheme, The Register, viewed 9 November 2010, <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/08/trusted_twitter/>.
Ostrow, A 2009, Actor Jonah Hill tells David Letterman he has a Twitter Imposter, Mashable, viewed 9 November 2010, <http://mashable.com/2009/07/14/jonah-hill-twitter/>.
Owens, S 2009, How celebrity imposters hurt Twitter’s credibility, Media Shift, viewed 9 November 2010, <http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/02/how-celebrity-imposters-hurt-twitters-credibility051.html>.
Sciretta, P 2009, The growing problem of celebrity imposters on Twitter, Slash Film, 9 November 2010, <http://www.slashfilm.com/the-growing-problem-of-celebrity-imposters-on-twitter/>.
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