Ashton Kutcher is turning his Twitter over to a management team.
After the big brouhaha concerning Ashton Kutcher’s asinine comments on Twitter regarding Joe Paterno’s firing at Penn State in the midst of the child sex scandal they’ve got going on up there, Ashton Kutcher is not allowing himself to tweet anymore. I guess if you really do wish for some people to shut up long enough, eventually it does come true.
Kutcher took to his Twitter to expel himself from the social media platform over the course of a diatribe about the real story of his insensitive comments. (Basically, he didn’t know anything, yet felt compelled to say something, because Twitter has made his thoughts feel self-important.)
Up until today, I have posted virtually every one of my tweets on my own, but clearly the platform has become too big to be managed by a single individual. When I started using twitter, it was a communication platform that people could say what they were thinking in real time and if their facts were wrong the community would quickly and helpfully reframe an opinion. It was a conversation, a community driven education tool, and opinion center that encouraged healthy debate. It seems that today that twitter has grown into a mass publishing platform, where ones tweets quickly become news that is broadcast around the world and misinformation becomes volatile fodder for critics.
Last night after returning home from work, I walked by the television and simply saw a headline that Joe Paterno had been fired. Having no more information than that, I assumed that he had been fired due to poor performance as an aging coach. As a football fan and someone who had watched Joe’s career move from that of legend/innovator to a head coach that fulfilled his duty in the booth, I assumed that the university had let him go due to football related issues. With that assumption (how dare I assume) I posted a tweet defending his career. I then when about my evening, had some dinner, did a little work, and about an hour later turned on ESPN where I got the full story. I quickly went back on my twitter account and found a hailstorm of responses calling me an “idiot” and several other expletives that I’ve become accustom to hearing for almost anything I post. I quickly retracted and deleted my previous post; however, that didn’t seem enough to satisfy people’s outrage at my misinformed post. I am truly sorry. And moreover am going to take action to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. And as an advocate in the fight against child sexual exploitation, I could not be more deeply saddened by the events at Penn State.
A collection of over 8 million followers is not to be taken for granted. I feel responsible to deliver informed opinions and not spread gossip or rumors 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 realize that it has grown into more than 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 as a secondary editorial measure, to ensure the quality of its content. My sincere apologies to anyone who I offended. It was a mistake that will not happen again.
If I would have known making a big deal out of Kutcher being a jackass would have rid us of his talentless self, I would have done something about this long ago. At least his followers will now have a management team reviewing the official Ashton Kutcher comments to come from his Twitter feed now. Perhaps they’ll get something of some intelligence delivered to them instead of the typical Ashton Kutcher speak.
