Tweets by Kutcher and Moore have left fans feeling cold
CELEBRITIES are hiring ghost writers to help them twitter in the latest social networking craze as the burden of writing 140-character messages for fans proves too onerous.
“Tweets”, as the messages are called, are supposed to be composed and dispatched live across the internet.
But there are growing suspicions that celebrities’ and politicians’ tweets are written by speechwriters and publicists.
Last week it was disclosed that the rapper 50 Cent had handed over his tweets to a ghost.
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Earlier this month the New York star, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, told 215,000 fans: “My ambition leads me through a tunnel that never ends.”
The words were not live but were lifted from an earlier interview by Chris Romero, who runs 50 Cent’s web pages. Last week Romero admitted that his boss did not use Twitter but said “the energy of it is all him”.
The comedian and author Stephen Fry, 51, probably Britain’s most popular twitterer, said it was a joy and a duty to keep posting on the site – “and it keeps boredom at bay at airports”.
Since Twitter emerged from a San Francisco high-tech company in August 2006, its users have developed their own code of conduct: be engaging and personal, do not embarrass anyone else and do it yourself.
America’s most popular sporting twitterer, the basketball star Shaquille O’Neal, last week told an American newspaper: “It’s 140 characters. If you need a ghost writer for that, I feel sorry for you.”
Britney Spears, the 27-year-old singer, advertised for staff to help her compose tweets.
Fans can distinguish between the professional tweets, which promote Spears’s music, and those written by the star herself. Last week she confined herself to bland messages such as Friday’s “had a great dinner with all of the [concert tour] dancers last night”.
But Demi Moore, 46, and her husband Ashton Kutcher, 31, tease one another in an affectionate style that sometimes leaves fans feeling cold.
The number of people twittering is growing fast, with the latest estimate at about 10m regular users worldwide.
The website has some practical uses. The Red Cross says it works well in emergencies: Twitter users broadcast the first accounts of last November’s terrorist attacks on Mumbai, helping rescue services reach victims quickly.
When a US Airways flight ditched in the Hudson River in New York in January, the first news appeared on Twitter within four minutes.
Sceptics, such as the television satirist Jon Stewart, suspect Twitter will prove a short-lived fad. A correspondent on his show said: “There’s no surprise young people love it – according to reports of young people by middle-aged people.”
This weekend Fry, posting from Bali, gave an answer to what to do when he runs out of things to tweet about: “Oh yes. E-mail backlog.”
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