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Monday 17 August 2015

It could never happen

Other than the ongoing, years-long Essendon Football Club doping saga and the fact that Australia really did win The Ashes in 2015 , the other big news in Oz right now is this:

"It was claimed that the parody Twitter account @RealMarkLatham is actually run by Mark Latham himself due to the similar language used in the Tweets and Mr Latham's columns."

Now, Mr Latham is a former Labor Party Leader of Her Majesty's [sic] Opposition and quite an odd and controversial character. He's been writing newspaper columns since leaving formal politics for years. I can't comment on their content, having never bothered to read any, but he's been in hot water recently over comments he made about a high-profile transgender person. 




Apparently, some big advertisers started to complain, so a little effort and research has been put into discovering the author of @RealMarkLatham. The fact that Cate McGregor (some of you may know of her previous life as the cricket commentator Malcolm McGregor) is a high-ranking member of the Australian Defence Force and a friend of the Australian Prime Minister may have had something to do with it, too.

"Buzzfeed says it has established that the Twitter account is linked to an email connected with Mark Latham."

So, what was the response of @RealMarkLatham? Deny everything (in a colourful manner):



"What makes the circumstances even more confusing is that the author of the Twitter account has been posting bizarre messages denying it is linked to Latham, ever since an article first claiming the link was published on Saturday."

I suppose the lesson is this: chOOse your enemies if you're a famous person who has a "fake" (self) parody Twitter account.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for posting this. Interesting - not that we need convincing that it is sooo unusual to have a self parody Twitter account, unlike some!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Maybe a certain Monsieur has started a trend. Not for the first time...

    ReplyDelete