Last night, Ashton Kutcher posted a dumb tweet about US college football coach Joe Paterno getting fired over a child sexual abuse scandal. He didn’t have all the details, and later retracted his tweet. Now he’s turning over his Twitter feed to a team of media experts to make sure he only makes an idiot of himself on purpose.
According to a post on his blog, he came home, saw a headline about Paterno getting fired, and just spouted off. It happens. It’s Twitter. But apparently he feels a huge sense of responsibility to his eight million followers who use ol’ Kelso as a primary news source, and doesn’t want to lead them astray:
A collection of over eight million followers is not to be taken for granted. I feel responsible for delivering an informed opinion and not spreading gossip or rumours through my twitter feed. While I feel that running this feed myself gives me a closer relationship to my friends and fans I’ve come to realise that it has grown into more that a fun tool to communicate with people. While I will continue to express myself through @Aplusk I’m going to turn the management of the feed over to my team at Katalyst Media to ensure the quality of it’s content.
Twitter’s an open mic that lets any dumb person say any dumb thing that pops into their dumb head at any moment. And no matter who you are, if you talk for a long enough time, you’re going to say something that gets you in trouble. You just are. But that doesn’t mean you bow out a whole means of communication. Because Twitter is basically just talking to people. If you say something that offends your friends, you don’t just shout “REDACTED” and never talk to them again. Or if you do, you suck. [Twitter]
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