Fake BP Twitter Account Offers Bitterly Comic Take on Oil Spill
The fake account poses as a BP spokesperson to send out messages like the one above to the account’s followers. (image: twitter.com)
With the Secretary of the Interior promising to “keep his boot on the neck of British Petroleum,” BP might want to do some public relations work to try to burnish its image. Unfortunately someone is already doing it for them with the fake BP Twitter account @BPGlobalPR, a parodic Twitter feed that has about 10 times more followers than the actual BP America Twitter account (and just slightly more than our own @heatingoil account).
The fake Twitter account has won many fans with its dark humor and scathing satire, as seen in tweets like: “Catastrophe is a strong word, let’s all agree to call it a whoopsie daisy,” and “If we had a dollar for every complaint about this oil spill, it wouldn’t compare to our current fortune. Oil is a lucrative industry!” BP Global PR has also gained the attention of the news media and BP itself; a BP spokesman told the Wall Street Journal that the fake account was “a shame.”
So far BP hasn’t taken any action to remove the fake Twitter account, which may be in violation of Twitter’s terms of service and has confused some Twitter users who thought the account was genuine and took issue with its irreverent tone. The Los Angeles Times talked with the once-anonymous tweeter (since outed as Mike Monteiro, CNET reports, who said that the fake account had raised more than $3,000 dollars for the Gulf Restoration Network by selling t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “BP cares.”
The fake BP representative has been less tolerant of competing BP Twitter accounts, accusing the genuine @BP_America account of being a fake and saying, “if we find out who is in charge of them, we will annihilate them.”
(image: twitter.com)
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Startup Toolkit – How to Make a Hit on the Internet says: says:
[...] online threats. Remember British Petroleum’s online nightmare – the fake BP Twitter account? It generates 10 times the number of visitor than BP’s Twitter account. Be sure to five [...]
Thomas Retterbush says: says:
It’s so easy to create a fake Twitter account, since they don’t ask for any kind of verification except an email account, and a bogus email account is even easier to create than a Twitter account, that I am amazed that there aren’t more bogus corporate, government and nonprofit accounts.