Monday, 1 April 2013

There Is A Person Bizarrely Capitalizing Off Kevin Ware's Injury On Twitter And Facebook

1. Yesterday, a Twitter user took advantage of Kevin Ware's horrifying injury in the Louisville-Duke March Madness game to make a fake Kevin Ware account.

[imagetag]

Image by Darron Cummings / AP


As of yesterday evening, the account had only tweeted five times: once thanking people for their support and rooting for Louisville, and four times responding to prominent Twitter users who had tweeted about Ware. (Ware's real account appears to be @_Woody23; it hasn't tweeted since January 2012.)

Since then, though, whoever thought this was a good idea has only gone farther with it.

3. The tweets started mostly as schlocky attempts at inspiration

[imagetag]

4. but quickly spun off in more disturbing directions. Here, whoever's running the account tries to call out another fake Ware Twitter.

[imagetag]

5. The account has also been trying to spread itself with pleas for retweets, mostly centered around the idea that someone could come with Ware to the Final Four.

[imagetag]

[imagetag]

7. There have been peculiar religious messages

[imagetag]

8. and a particularly bizarre spate of tweets making terrible puns off the word "leg." (Not sure how anyone could possibly think this was a guy who is actually in the hospital with a broken leg.)

[imagetag]

[imagetag]

[imagetag]

11. There have been real Kevin Ware photos co-opted by the account

[imagetag]

12. and attempts to stay timely, which is a common trope of parody accounts.

[imagetag]

13. The weirdest thing about it is that, as of now, there doesn't seem to be an objective beyond just gaining followers — the sincerity of many of the tweets makes it seem like just a weird plea for attention.

[imagetag]

14. It also interacted with former Major League Baseball player Chipper Jones, who was fooled into thinking it was the real Kevin Ware.

[imagetag]

15. It's pretty grotesque to imagine a real human sending out these tweets.

[imagetag]

16. Now there's also a Facebook page, which is linked to in the Twitter's bio. It features polls about the Final Four and other pointless, confusing stuff.

[imagetag]

Via: facebook.com


The account has resumed tweeting this morning much the same as it left off: "For every dark night, there's a brighter day" being an impressively dumb highlight. Although @KevinWare_5 remains live, it is in clear violation of Twitter's Terms of Service, which forbids accounts from pretending to be real people without acknowledging themselves as parody.



18. UPDATE: @KevinWare_5 has been banned, as of 12:15 pm or so EST. Count one for decency.


19. UPDATE 2: Here's another fake Ware account, @5KevinWare. Basically all it does is thank people, but it has 30,000 followers.


@5KevinWare

Visit the source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/ktlincoln/there-is-a-person-bizarrely-capitalizing-off-kevin-wares-inj
Article author: ktlincoln

No comments:

Post a Comment