Octogenarian media mogul Rupert Murdoch has taken to Twitter. He's quickly scooped up almost 100,000 followers but immediately got in hot water for an off-the-cuff tweet about British workers.
While Murdoch's troubled first tweets showed his misunderstanding of how to use the at symbol (and some basic grammar), his first big bust-up with the Twitter populace came as an ill-received message.
While holidaying on the Caribbean island of Saint Bart's, he wrote "maybe Brits have too many holidays for broke country!" Twittering Brits weren't best pleased with the billionaire's tweet.
Then things got interesting. A Twitter user called @Wendi_Deng, the name of Murdoch's 43-year-old wife, wrote "RUPERT!!! delete tweet!". Which he did. Deng then continued to send messages to Murdoch and various other celebrities, and garnered media coverage of her own digital debut.
Her validity was confirmed by News International and she even sported the "Verified Tick" on her profile, a little blue symbol that lets you know that a Twitter profile is from the bonafide celebrity. Except, this time, both NI and Twitter got it wrong. The account is actually a spoof.
"You have to wonder... why Twitter verified this account for a full day. I never received any communication from them about this," the unnamed account holder wrote in a coming-out tweet. "I was as surprised -- and even a little alarmed -- when I saw the Verified tick appear on the profile.
"It might be only a small matter, but you have to worry about the management of News International and Twitter if they can both readily confirm, for a while at least, that this was the account of a very noted personality," the mystery prankster wrote.
Wired.co.uk asked Twitter for comment. A spokesperson for the social network told us, "we don't comment on our verification process but can confirm that the @wendi_deng account was mistakenly verified for a short period of time. We apologize for the confusion this caused."
Murdoch has had an interesting relationship with the internet. In a 2009 article in Vanity Fair, biographer Michael Wolff wrote that the mogul viewed the internet as "predatory", writing: "For him it's a place for porn, thievery, and hackers."
Murdoch has also taken heat for erecting paywalls around the websites of his various news organisations — including The Times and The Sunday Times — but seemed to have a bit of a higher opinion of technology when his empire launched iPad-only digital magazine, The Daily. Murdoch also tweets on an iPad.
The chairman also spent $580m on MySpace, in 2005 — a year before Mark Zuckerberg's competitor Facebook went from a schools-only enterprise to a global phenomenon. News Corp sold. MySpace in 2011 to Specific Media and Justin Timberlake for a scant $35 million.
