Is there a murderer on Twitter? Law of average says "yep, probably", but is there one tweeting about an actual, real-life murder? Possibly.
Word is out about a Twitterer by the name of @dinner_guest is discussing some less than savoury stuff in his (her?) account. Whether real or just a sick joke, there’s no doubt that its graphical nature is pretty disturbing and even the hardened hacks at Techcrunch are feeling uneasy.
Personally I think it’s highly unlikely that it’s genuine (although fearful that by saying that I’ll bring some hex down on myself), the background and avatar are too professional and the whole thing smacks of a book promotion.
I can see the wider concern that if Jan Moir and her colleagues get hold of it, we’ll have a #twitterharboursmurderers story on our hands but let’s not forget that the internet is stuffed full with dark and grim material.
The other day my RSS reader, via digg, kindly brought this nasty little quote to my attention. It’s clearly written by a pathetic little git with an inferiority complex, but what’s more disturbing is that the headline has attracted 4781 diggs by other users.
You know this kind of stuff is out there, you know that lowlifes like this exist, but despite avoiding 99.9% of it, when you spend so much time browsing the web, it occasionally comes out of nowhere to remind you of the dark side.
So let’s not get too het up about the publisher’s Twitter stunt. It doesn’t take much digging to find stuff we should really be worried about.
UPDATE: TechCrunch Europe have an interesting new piece on how @dinner_guest is probably fake.
Image via Van Damme M