The fake Gary Glitter debacle only just failed to eclipse the weirdness of discovering in the very early hours of New Year’s day that Rupert Murdoch had joined Twitter.
Something happened between those two events that helped the OfficialGlitter account to appear to be really run by the shamed popstar and garner over 15,000 followers. What happened was that Twitter suspended official verification, which meant that there was no real way of knowing whether the account was real or not. Actually twitter has turned verification into a money-making exercise, available only to advertisers and partners.
The Daily Mail, ITN and The Sun all added fuel to the fire with articles about the supposed social media comeback. Column inches were even devoted to the announcement of a tour and new album. This would surely not have happened if the official process was still in place.
If you search OfficialGlitter on twitter you’ll see that a huge amount of unnecessary upset was caused by the so-called social media experiment. The idea that social networks fuel child abuse is arrant nonsense. Parents do need to be vigilant about who their kids associate with, on the wed as elsewhere but this isn’t about government regulation. It was Gary Glitter’s infamy linked to the notion that it could actually be him that created the problem here.
Twitter should bring back official verification. #verifyback
PR and the Social Web 