Guess whose Twitter account followed Samantha and her friends…
The Hollywood Gossip web page thinks its hilarious that the twitter feed supposedly assigned to the President of the United States was found to have, among the 650,000 odd twitter accounts it was following, at least one hard porn site listed. It’s not hilarious. It’s symptomatic.
This isn’t even the first time this has happened. Last year, the same site that purports to put out tweets from Potus (and occasionally does, which are marked with the notation “bo”) was outed as following the descriptively-named “Celebrity Side-Boob.” This year’s funky fave (it has since been removed) of @BarackObama is Wicked Pictures, and it sells a lot more than “side-boobs.”
The President’s tweets are managed by Organizing for Action, the supposedly private, non-profit, non-governmental, non-political organization morphed out of Obama’s campaign apparatus (and if you think I have major ethics problems with a sitting President fronting a non-profit political advocacy group, you’re correct). Whether the public knows that the President isn’t really the one communicating with them under his name or not, it should be obvious that the organization and individuals responsible for maintaining the account are also responsible for doing so in a manner that does not embarrass the President. It should also be obvious that a competent, diligent, responsible professional does not frequent porn sites on the job.
Naturally, for this is now the familiar routine of knee-jerk Obama enablers, the indignant defenses to this will be…
- Hey, it’s just one porn site out of 650,000 accounts!
- Everybody knows, even though the account description suggests otherwise, that the tweets aren’t really from Barack Obama!
- OK, you caught us. Big deal.
- Porn is cool. Don’t be so sanctimonious.
- The French and Italian leaders could follow porn sites and nobody would care.
- As if you Republicans don’t follow porn sites, too…
And so on. I say this: who do you think you are fooling, other than yourself?
For the President of the United States to have his official Twitter account seen to be following a porn site or even “Celebrity Side-Boob” is an insult to the Presidency and diminishes the dignity of and respect for the office. For the President to allow such juveniles to speak for him every day is an insult to the public, and emblematic of his lax and amateurish management approach. The fact that Organizing For Action is this unprofessional is typical of the supervision and staffing of the entire administration, for which the President is personally accountable.
And there is nothing hilarious about it.
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Sources: Hollywood Gossip, The Blaze 1, 2
Ethics Alarms 
Hey, it’s just one porn site out of 650,000 accounts!
Everybody knows, even though the account description suggests otherwise, that the tweets aren’t really from Barack Obama!
OK, you caught us. Big deal.
Porn is cool. Don’t be so sanctimonious.
The French and Italian leaders could follow porn sites and nobody would care.
As if you Republicans don’t follow porn sites, too…
Bada-bing, bada-beng, bada-bung, bada-bong, bada-bang, bada-BOOM! Best listing of the defenses of enablers of the sexually loose but popular ever laid out.
Being human never really was dignified. Presidents aren’t supposed to have anything to do with sex, right?
Sarcasm aside, that’s actually the way the politics works. It’s stupid, but it is what it is. Getting Playboy at the White House would be inappropriate.
That said, I don’t see the same kind of issue with a twitter following. The President is supposed to be the President of everyone in the US, right? I see the follow back as a near automatic, and this following as nothing more than “I care about all my constituents.” Refusing to follow a corporation because of their legal business seems like it would be worse than following them. If it was Chick-fil-A, would it be appropriate for the OFA to decide not to follow them back? I’d think that would be considered partisan.
That’s a genuinely clever argument, tgt. I wish I knew where your tongue was when you wrote it, but don’t spoil it by telling me.
Well, do you have a response for it?
In reality, I think this was probably the result of a bored guy going through and manually re-following people screwing up. Maybe he saw WickedPictures and thought of Wicked the Musical. More likely, he just was on autopilot. It could also have been a script that followed twitter users in a list or something.
I don’t see a need to read bad intent or incompetence in here when it could be nothing more than a basic typo.
It would get any corporate equivalent fired, typo or not (and I think the typos argument is a stretch.)
I’m sure it’s some bored kid who didn’t think anyone would notice. And responsible organizations don’t put such people in the position of affecting a President’s image….and responsible Presidents don’t allow organizations overseeing their official statements, even over social networks, to be so sloppy and incompetent.
When do I get credit for going through that whole post without a single Clinton joke?
It is impossible to make sure everyone is going to always act properly. You’ve created an impossible standard to be a responsible organization or responsible President.
Either all organizations are irresponsible, or your comment has no meaning.
But this ISN’T an isolated occurrence. That’s the point. It’s a pattern of entrusting inexperienced, unprofessional hacks in jobs that require better, with no oversight. The point is that after “Celebrity side-boob” (was THAT a typo?) this shouldn’t happen.
Adding people to a social media feed is a job for an inexperienced, unskilled person. You’re not going to find a politically experienced person to sit there and follow people. Sometimes, the unskilled people are going to screw up. The lack of oversight could be a valid issue if “celebrity side-boob” came second, but do you think the overseer would think that WickedPictures is porn? I knew there was a porn company called Wicked. If I wasn’t thinking about porn, I wouldn’t have made the connection.
It’s true that Wicked Pictures isn’t a very telling name. The feed’s personal description is transparent, but who’s to say that that was present when the staffer responsible clicked “follow”? Suppose that when he did so, the description he read was something like, “Wicked Pictures is an award-winning producer of films for…” With 650,000 feeds to follow back, failing to look past the ellipses strikes me as an understandable error, and certainly not something to which we can ascribe unethical intentions.
Basic typos aren’t the result of incompetence?
Basic typos that will be attributed to the President of the United States!
They can be, but they aren’t necessarily so. Everyone commits typos.
Not me…
Gah! Stupid angle brackets that I used to denote a sound effect, trying to be read as HTML… how about this:
*Rimshot*
“Everyone does it. Everyone makes mistakes.”
Big deal. There are still consequences and we need to proof read.
There are systems that can be put in place by an administration that is interested in being, and appearing to be, competent and serious. bo is too busy rolling up his sleeves and making speeches or ‘tweeting’ to worry about small things. The devil is in the details.
And why does he get a pass when George Bush was slammed non-stop for being a self-professed “big picture” guy and over-delegating? bo gets to say, “I didn’t know that was going on, the government’s too big” and he skates. Can you imagine the firestorm that would erupt if George Bush ever said, “I didn’t know that was going on?”
Big deal. There are still consequences and we need to proof read.
I never claimed we shouldn’t. I claimed that errors do not necessarily mean incompetence and irresponsibility up the line.
There are systems that can be put in place by an administration that is interested in being, and appearing to be, competent and serious.
No system is failsafe. Your argument is still: there was an error, everyone’s horrible!
And why does he get a pass when George Bush was slammed non-stop for being a self-professed “big picture” guy and over-delegating? bo gets to say, “I didn’t know that was going on, the government’s too big” and he skates. Can you imagine the firestorm that would erupt if George Bush ever said, “I didn’t know that was going on?”
It looks like you’re pivoting to different situations.
I am saying a typo isn’t an excuse, its symptomatic of the problems with this administration and its head. You think a typo indicates nothing.
A typo doe indicate nothing. It isn’t symptomatic of anything other than being human.
Well this is more interesting than Broccoligate.. Where the President was heard to say to a group of children yesterday that Broccoli was his favorite food.. While there is a clear pattern of meat dishes he favors.
I suspect he was mocking the Bushes for hating broccoli. Wasn’t it George Bush Sr. who hated broccoli? It was probably a talking point David Plouffe worked up and tested for bo.
While there is a clear pattern of meat dishes he favors.
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Yes, such as dog.
Let’s face it, Jack, this administration is an embarrassment.
Nothing like your kid linking off on a porn site from the twitter feed of the POTUS. Classy!
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I can see why Pope Francis only follows himself and the Dalai Lama follows no-one.
I don’t have a Twitter account, but I wonder if one could set up an account like Obamafan92, get followed and then change one’s user name and Twitter feed to something more nefarious. Hanlon’s razor probably implies that that is not what happened here, but it would be a good way to get some free publicity if one wanted it.
I’m loathe to agree with TGT on more than one item a week. It seems to violate natural law. But the following of a xxx twitter account was very much likely an automatic thing, either a computer program following back every account that follows the home account or a low paid functionary clicking a mouse button, and after re-follow #8,567 of the day, the functionary just stopped noticing details on the blurred screen.
Of course, that raises the question, why the hell would they re-follow EVERYONE who follows them?
Is it to communicate a message of ‘trendiness’?
(not a priority of a leader)
To communicate a message of “hey, we listen to your ideas”?
(anyone who has ever dealt with Twitter knows that after about 50-100 people you follow, it’s pretty difficult to actively keep up with their tweets, and you only luckily see what you happen to see when you open the program…so no, they won’t be listening to anyone’s ideas via Twitter – plus, that’s why we elect representatives)
(oh and subsequently, not Constitutionally the business of the President…he’s not a big legislator)
I think this just betrays more of this President’s priority to appear ‘cool’. (not a priority of leadership).
Not using Twitter is part of the New Cool. Because I said so.
I second that.