The State of Israel now owns the Twitter handle @Israel, following a reported five-figure deal with Israel Meléndez of Miami, Florida, conducted in cooperation with Twitter.
The Twitter short-messaging network does not permit what might be termed "handle squatting," by users who register a bunch of underused Twitter names in the hopes of selling them later to people who actually want to use them.
Meléndez, however, reportedly registered his own @Israel name in 2007, so he can hardly be called a "squatter." And according to the Spanish-language publication Publico, which first reported this story about two weeks ago, he also operates a pornographic site called greenshines.com. He apparently used the @israel account as his personal account until, he recalled, it received too much abuse directed at Israel, the country.
"My account was basically unused because I was getting dozens of replies every day from people who thought the account belonged to the State of Israel," Meléndez told The New York Times in a story published Tuesday.
Now, it does.
The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced Aug. 30 that it was moving its old @IsraelMFA account to @Israel (see image).
Following the sale, the ministry deleted Meléndez's tweets and replaced them with the hundreds of tweets and followers from its old @israelMFA account. Some of those messages are just canned responses: "Despite your tweet attacks, israel maintains an ongoing dialog with any one that wants to ask us any thing," "Explains that from a legal perspective http://bit.ly/cDsTk8" and "Legal aspects of aid to gaza [same link]" appear quite often.
If the quantity of posts on @Israel and the use of these canned responses are any indication, the ministry's experience with running the account appears consistent with that of Meléndez's -- in that the handle generates a lot of incoming messages that may need a response. Buying this Twitter handle gives Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs a way to communicate more directly with supporters and detractors alike.
Just one problem: Twitter's official rules forbid the sale of a Twitter account between two parties directly. In certain cases, the company will participate in a separate, written agreement to transfer a Twitter name from one user to another, which is what reportedly happened here following telephone negotiations last month. Perhaps it's a sign of the times that the sale of a Twitter name is generating more interest than the sale of a web domain has in years.
This story took a bit of unraveling, but that appears to be the sum of it: A porn website owner named Israel sold @israel to Israel with help from Twitter. Why did that simple transaction take so much unraveling? Maybe it had something to do with The New York Times headline: "After Negotiations, Israel Emerges on Twitter" (and that it appeared at least two weeks after the transaction).
The Times does mention that Israel closed down its original account before erasing Meléndez's content, but that's hardly the same thing as "emerging" onto Twitter "after negotiations." In fact, Israel "emerged" onto Twitter more than three-and-a-half months ago, and this username changed hands at least two weeks ago.
As always, it helps to delve into a story if you want to understand a headline.
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