Thanks to Allen at the indomitable Angry Black Lady Chronicles for curating this list:
For those not on the Twitter, it's a little complicated to follow this story, but bear with me. These are the tweets from the National Senate Republican Committee account. Now in Twitter parlance, "RT" refers to "retweet" and is customarily used at the head of someone else's tweet that you wish to amplify to your followers. It does not necessarily connote approval or agreement with the original tweet, but simply a desire to share it with your followers.
Got that?
Well, here's the thing with all those RTs on behalf of the Sen. John Cornyn-headed NRSC: they're all fakes. They wrote them themselves and crafted them to look like they were merely re-tweeting something written by prominent Democrats and Democratic groups. And this goes out to the more than 14,000 followers of the NRSC twitter account.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee’s getting blowback today from both the left and right for a series of fake re-tweets sent from the NRSC’s official @nrsc Twitter account. The bogus RTs each make reference to Democrats failing to produce a budget, and include a link to a webpage, www.demsplanforamerica.com, that is–wait for it–a blank page.[..]
And surprise–nobody’s laughing. Even Andy Levy, who helps bring the funny to Fox News Channel’s overnight Red Eye, was quick to blast the NRSC via Twitter, “@NRSC What the hell is wrong with you? How do you not realize it’s unethical to make up fake tweets from people?”
Klassy with a K, non? The NRSC is willfully impersonating tweets from the President of the United States in order to smear him.
Twitter itself is an interesting phenomena...it's like a cocktail party with a 1000s of conversations taking place simultaneously, and one weaves around, jumping from conversation to conversation, overhearing stories and new items and you choose how much or how little you want to add to the conversations. At its best, Twitter is an incredible platform to broadcast your messages to your self-selected followers. But at its worst, it's a cesspool of sock puppetry, harassment and cyber-bullying. And the Twitter gods simply have not figured out a way to deal with this kind of hackery.
Calls to both Cornyn's office and the NRSC to defend this have as yet not been returned. Allen at ABLC imagines if this kind of behavior is considered fair play what fun could be had retweeting faked tweets from Cornyn's account. They are definitely not safe for work, but hilarious.
