The fake Cokie Roberts twitter feed was an epic bit of trolling:
Lots of journalists have been retweeting the misguided Applebee’s queries. BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski speculated the whole thing may be an “Applebees viral marketing campaign.”
In 2009, Roberts told a crowd at the Newseum that Twitter is a “rude” and “appalling” technology, according to The Hill newspaper. Perhaps that was inspiration for the hoaxster.
The that powers that be Twitter has since closed the account and deleted the tweets.
The Applebees angle makes me think that the hoaxster may be one of you.
Your secret’s safe with me.
gbear
I blame Obama.
SparkleMotion!
Couldn’t have happened to a better* gal.
*By “better” I mean more insufferable, more intoxicated by her own pretend insight, and more representative of the beltway press’s self-obsession.
different-church-lady
Wow, Cokie and I agree on something.
Schlemizel
being a cranky old fart I refuse to tweet in any way shape or form. I missed the whole thing!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
It doesn’t matter if its real or not, it’s out there.
CokieRoberts
Nobody here would do such a thing.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Romney’s campaign motto.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
So when are they going to get around to shutting down the fake David Brooks satire that’s been trolling the NYT for years now?
ericblair
I’ve been tweeting, but it’s probably the chili. Sorry.
I gotta agree that most tweets aren’t worth the two seconds to read them; however, it’s because they’re generally shallow and stupid and not “rude” and “appalling”. I guess I’m more concerned about usefulness and insight more than whether someone says fuck or not. I’ll try to work on that, I guess.
ranchandsyrup
It’s always projection!
J. Michael Neal
@Schlemizel: I got the scores right, just the days reversed. Perfect in three out of four dimensions.
North Dakota is pretty good, though I’ve had a suspicion for a couple of years that they play harder against us than anyone else for obvious reasons. Their big problems are a lack of finishers and an appalling lack of discipline. JLam took some epically dumb penalties on Sunday and her sister finished a 4-2 game in the box.
We had stretches where we didn’t look very good in both games. I can’t decide whether this shows some weaknesses or whether it’s just a good sign that they can fail to play their best and still beat a good team. On the upside, there aren’t a lot of teams on the schedule that are fast enough to exploit those weaknesses.
J. Michael Neal
It makes me think that it’s one of you, Doug.
kindness
It wasn’t me. I’d have made Cokie to be all the things she hates. How much awfullness can one fit into 140 characters?
Donut
This is good news for John McCain, and obviously proves that the polls can’t be trusted save to show that Romney has the momentum.
1badbaba3
Nicely done, Mr. Crusher. Nicely done.
MikeJ
@kindness:
Which is why yours wouldn’t have been as funny or believable enough to get other media types to pick it up.
Xecky Gilchrist
@kindness: How much awfullness can one fit into 140 characters?
I don’t know, but I believe this is the research question Twitter was conceived to answer.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@ericblair: I made a dismissive, off-hand remark about twitter here once, and got comically enraged response from someone whose handle I never saw again, basically saying I was a stupid old who didn’t understand the innertoobz. Which is all true, but they were very mean about it.
YellowJournalism
“I am Spartacus!”
Whoever it is will now be my hero of the day.
Anna in PDX
I thought I’d open this comment thread and everyone would claim credit a la Spartacus.
Anna in PDX
Wow, crossposted with 18. GMTA.
leinie
@J. Michael Neal:
Saw Saturday’s score and thought “JMN was off by a day.” Didn’t realize you’d gotten Sunday too.
You recovered from the flatness that is the flatness of ND’s Red River Valley yet?
J. Michael Neal
@Anna in PDX: I am Crassus!
Maxwel
I thought it was tweets by twits.
J. Michael Neal
@leinie: Somewhere around Alexandria the world became normal again. It may be the lamest continental divide around, but there was at least a bit of up and down.
scott (the other one)
My good lady wife joined the twitter back in 2007, I think, when we’d first moved from the east coast to San Diego county and encountered our first wildfires not long thereafter. With no family or friends nearby, we turned to our local NPR station…which advised people to watch their twitter feed for up to the second updates. Sure enough, there were hundreds of locals updating the exact location of the fire minute-by-minute. Made several still sleepless nights much, much less stressful.
So, sure, people can and do say insipid stuff on twitter all the time. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s more than worth it. And not just ‘cuz I say insipid stuff on twitter all the time.
Mnemosyne
@ericblair:
It helps to follow professional comedians and other funny people. George Takei (yes, of “Star Trek” fame) is one of the funniest Tweeters out there. If you watch “Downton Abbey,” Patton Oswalt does some very funny live-tweeting of it.
ericblair
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I’m expecting it. It’s not like public short message services are anything new, either, and don’t have their uses. In fact, this is about the only time I’m logged in to Twitter: there’s a major storm underway and short messages to a broad public are useful.
As an enterprise IT guy, I can say with some confidence that one thing we don’t need right now is more useless content-free communication to already overloaded people. I’m not sure what the long-term strategy to capabilities like Siri is, but I’m guessing it’s to develop an actual useful automated assistant to filter through the megabytes of useless shit everyone gets every day into actionable information.
Maude
@ericblair:
I like Twitter. It depends on who you follow. I follow Bloomberg news, NASA and that sort of thing. NOAA has done great tweets since Sandy started.
I don’t know about a lot of Twitter, because I ignore it.
I do understand that it could be irritating and don’t blame anyone who hates it.
Edit, I follow Mr. Johnson.
Maude
We are getting some power brown outs, may be offline soon.
Southern Beale
I was hoping someone would capture some screen shots, the fake Twitter account was hilarious. Apparently “Cokie” was confusing Google and Twitter and was trying to find the nearest Applebee’s location. It was so funny.
taylormattd
Hahahaha.
I love the whole “mistaken twitter / facebook for a search engine” genre.
There is a great one about “Dad” opening a facebook account, and then, believing his status box is a search engine, typing a bunch of porn terms into it.
Joseph Nobles
Thanks, I needed that laugh, DougJ.
rb
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Ha!
Lojasmo
@CokieRoberts:
You made me LOL.
Chris
Doug, I know you’re jealous. You have to up your Idiot Trolling
Joel
Speaking of twitter…
Unskewedpolls argument: Nate Silver seems kinda gay + ??? = Romney landslide! http://www.examiner.com/article/the-far-left-turns-to-nate-silver-for-wisdom-on-the-polls?cid=db_articles …
#fivethirtyeight
Liberty60
@Joel:
TBOGG:
UnSkewedPolls guy = Human Gravy Producer
shortstop
Jesus, that’s funny. But that song is firmly lodged in my brain now. I believe I’ll sing it to the dog in its entirety. She loves that shit.
I did think of all of you while having “dinner” at an Applebees in Toledo this weekend. After 12 hours of canvassing, we just wanted to shove something into our pieholes, but I was very disappointed to discover that there is no fucking salad bar.
David
Doug, once again you confirm my belief in your unerring musical taste be quoting from one of my favorite records ever.
sharl
Awww, I just started following ‘her’! So unfair…