Russian President to Appear on Twitter Personally Unhappy with Actions of Fake President’s Account

Can you name any field that you want to get news on and somehow don’t manage to find relevant sources on Twitter? I certainly can’t as Twitter has definitely become a brief copy of the entire internet and you can get to know almost everything that exists online via Twitter – but only in a shorter form.

Of course politics is no exception and huge crowds of people from all nations bring politicians to Twitter as well because these politicians want to talk to their target audiences directly where they are. Russian president Medvedev is well known for his interest in various internet tools as he has a video blog and a blog on LiveJournal and is told to even read the comments he receives there. But he has not appeared on Twitter yet – at least personally.

But of course for a politician of his size, it would have been surprising not to have any fake accounts – and such accounts do exist. The most important one with 11 thousand followers is usually engaged in simply posting links to official news from Kremlin website – and this account has not caused any problems until now. But things have changed – and this change is told to eventually bring the president himself to Twitter.

The thing is that this Twitter account misbehaved on the day of last week’s terrorist bombings in Moscow: a comment was published that looked very much like the first official comment on the event from the president and quickly got quoted by news agencies and various publications – with the problem being that the president had nothing to do with the words. And the worst part is that people in the president administration seem to actually not know the person behind the account so they cannot influence it in any way.

Now they have reportedly contacted Twitter team directly asking to remove the fake account that is mistaken by many for a real one – and while I have no idea how Twitter will react, for now this fake account has published a tweet stating that posting will stop in May when the president starts tweeting himself personally.

I wonder if President Medvedev will actually update the official Twitter stream (the name of the account is not announced yet) or if he will follow the format selected by other politicians, including Barack Obama and will only send occasional updates himself while the majority of work with the account will be handled by dedicated officials. But I can definitely imagine Russian people sending requests and complains to the president limited to 140 characters – which will probably help them reach the right ears and be understood (and acted on) properly.

Via (in Russian)