'Murderer' freaks out Twitter
2009-11-20 09:51
Cape Town - The web was atwitter this week with rumours that a serial killer was tweeting about his life and murderous activities on popular social networking site Twitter.
The suspicious Twitter account called dinner_guest was first discovered by TechCrunch.com which led to speculation on whether this killer is for real, or whether it is perhaps a marketing campaign for some horror movie, or just a sick joke.
The account described in great detail the actions of a Brighton (UK) based serial killer. Here are some of the creepy tweets:
"Nice day in #brighton have an ear in my pocket."
"Boiling it didn't work, the skin became thin and the smell of fat made my stomach turn. Left it floating in a bucket, don't think I will go back today."
"So difficult to know how much blood is too much, I know the body holds pints..but it’s hard to tell how much when it spreads."
"Got back to the lockin to find my guest dead. Must have bled out, thought he'd have a good few hours left."
Luckily Twitter users' worst fears were laid to rest, when TheNextWeb.com reported on Thursday that dinner_guest was a fictional character.
"Today, dinner_guest decided to do the right thing and edited the description of their account to 'A fictional character born out of an artist's mind. A meme experiment & analysis', bringing a sigh of relief to those who have tracked the story."
In a quick e-mail interview, the Brighton-based artist, who wanted to remain anonymous, told TheNextWeb.com that he/she "was bored of the predictablity of social networking
conversations."
"I wanted to make people consider being a little more experimental with content. Thinking about content as something to be celebrated not regurgitated."
Very creative, however, it still made people think about what would happen if a serial killer really did use Twitter to document his horrific acts.
"What would Twitter’s management reactions be, presumably to immediately shut the account down and notify the police? But then again, it then closes probably the only immediate channel of communication," blogger Zee wrote.
This time it was just an experiment, but in future, people might just look at their Twitter contacts a little differently…