idaho governor:column

Will the Real @ButchOtter Please Stand Up?

By Sharon Fisher, 5-01-09

The Idaho Twittersphere was, well, a-twitter this morning with news that @ButchOtter—a Twitter account set up to parody the governor—had been shut down and the real Idaho Governor’s office, which had been posting under @IdahoGov, had taken control of it.

Boise Tweeters familiar with the situation are tweeting this morning that representatives of the attorney general’s office were being sent to people’s offices in an attempt to find out who was behind the account, with threats being made about impersonation being a felony.

Twitter started a new policy earlier this year adding Twitter squatting and trademark infringement to its terms of use policies, after the problem had first started cropping up last fall. “Accounts with clear INTENT to mislead others will be immediately suspended,” the company said.

Posts from the fake @ButchOtter are no longer available on Twitter, but people who had been following it said they were clearly satirical. The consensus this morning was also that while it was reasonable for Otter to want to take over the name, sending out attorneys to people’s workplace was overkill and showed a lack of humor that could make it more difficult for the Governor to attract votes from this segment of the population.

There is now a @ButchOtter_1 on Twitter, with 179 followers, with a note that the account had been suspended due to “strange activity,” Twitter’s generic message for such issues. (Interestingly, a search for “ButchOtter” on Twitter brings up only this site, not the real one.)

Thus far, the real @ButchOtter—who is following only one person, @IdahoGov, and has 69 followers—has made two posts, one pointing people to his website and one pointing people to a swine flu website, which was a duplicate of the posting made by @IdahoGov.

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