9 Comments
This bird has a tweeting problem
Even though we’re barely into winter break, Columbia stuff has happened on the World Wide Web. So.
About a week ago, it looked like Spectator‘s opinion page was handed the same Twitter treatment as we did earlier this month. (If you haven’t yet explored @BwogTheater, you should.) Spec got @CUSpecOpEds, which cut across political lines to ridicule all sorts of Spec opeds. Bwog stupidly forgot to archive the page, but one was, “Hazing was the best traumatic experience of my life.” Incongruously, this page used the Spectrum logo.
Klout-mad Speccies responded on Twitter with varying degrees of humor. But then @CUSpecOpEds disappeared! The account had been suspended!
So we emailed Spec. According to new Spectator editor-in-chief Abby Abrams:
Spectator reached out to Twitter regarding the @CUSpecOpEds account in the hopes that Twitter could ask the account’s owners to stop using the Spectrum logo and to make it clear that the account was a parody by putting up a disclaimer like the @BwogTheater parody account uses. The way that Twitter support works, though, is that you simply identify the account about which you’re requesting help, and then Twitter takes actions as it sees fit. So I don’t know any more specifics beyond our request. I only saw that the account was suspended when you emailed us about it.
(Remember @deantini? Whose best was, more or less: “A joke from your fun dean: two free radicals walk into 1020. Two years later, they can’t find jobs.”)
So there you have it! Reporting Twitter accounts… it makes stuff happen!
Update: A helpful commenter posted an archived version of the Twitter feed.
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9 Comments
@WHERE are our grades?
@Devil's Advocate Actually, Abby’s email makes it sound like Spec didn’t actually want the account suspended, but Twitter just did it themselves. The Bwog Theater account doesn’t actually use any logo and has a disclaimer, so it’s not really fair to compare the two…
@Also worth noting that another difference between the compared twitter accounts is that Spec tries to maintain a consistent standard of journalistic integrity while Bwog does not. That’s not to say that Bwog is any worse; it just serves a slightly different and equally necessary purpose. Imitation of a legitimate news source, like Spec (though legitimate doesn’t mean perfect…), has gravity for readers who try to obtain reliable information with consistency from that source – and that’s important beyond the ego of Spec (which I think this was a jab at?). Given that consideration and the fact that the account was clear impersonation, I’m not sure why any action, up to and including removal of the account, would be uncalled for.
On a somewhat related note, I think a lot of students enjoy reading both media outlets, and I’m not really sure where the sense of bitterness between Bwog / Spec comes from. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Spec reference Bwog except in the context of Bwog breaking a story first, which seems pretty benign to me. I don’t understand how this article constituted valuable information, so it probably just stems from that bitterness. And I just think readers of both publications would feel better and happier if you stopped perpetuating a rivalry that we, frankly, don’t care about.
tl; dr – Spec was justified, Bwog is cool, too, and the world would be a happier place if this whole Bwog/Spec competition stopped.
@Anonymous >not caring
> writing that wall of text
>alum
> on campus
@Anonymous Are you kidding me? The only interesting thing about reading campus publications is when they fight each other.
@ugh spec way to free speech, spec. somewhere, prezbo is crying a single tear
@Anonymous Archived page:
http://archive.is/YUHNU or http://cl.ly/T7el
@Oh god We wouldn’t ever want to taint the good Spectrum name…
@Anonymous It’s times like these that we remember that as shitty as Bwog is, it doesn’t suck quite as hard as Spec.