Kanye West Calls out Fake Twitter Account

by Jarrett Martineau | December 8, 2008 at 10:31 am

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Celebrity Twitter accounts are nothing new — but finding ones that have the actual celebrities managing them is much less frequent.

This time, it turns out that the supposed Kanye West Twitter account - http://twitter.com/kanyewest - was never that of Mr. West.

Oh internets, you've done it again.

Will the real Kanye please stand up?

One of the more popular celeb Twitters was the one that everybody thought belonged to rapper-turned-"pop-artist" Kanye West. West was never the most prolific Twitterer (he prefers to express himself on his blog), but he chimed in occasionally about the election and offered the occasional update on the progress of 808s and Heartbreaks before it dropped a few weeks ago. Or so we thought.

Oh, and he also apparently proclaimed his ignorance of one Stephen Colbert, host of the "Colbert Report" and instigator of a very serious beef with Mr. West.

Too bad that Twitter account wasn't actually Kanye's, it turns out. Posting on his blog this weekend, Kanye wrote, "I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS... THIS IS NOT ME!!!!!" above an image of the Twitter page as it stood in the wake of the Colbert tweet. And as of this morning, http://twitter.com/kanyewest/ has been deleted.

In hindsight, I suppose it was foolish to think that Kanye could ever keep it to just 140 characters.

While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, impersonation is a whole other issue — and one that Twitter needs to get under control before more harmful disinformation is retweeted across the twitterverse.