PM admits Twitter gobbledegook
2009-12-09 12:39
London - British Prime Minister Gordon Brown admitted on Tuesday he should oversee the family computer more closely, after his young son posted a string of gobbledegook on his wife's Twitter page.
Followers of Sarah Brown's popular feed on the micro-blogging site - received by more than a million people - were startled last week to see her apparently exclaim "fvdfzsrsazxzzxcvbnmadgfhjjkqwrtyuuuiop".
Brown explained on Tuesday that it had been his three-year-old son Fraser who grabbed the chance to express himself on the computer while his mother was briefly out of the room.
"Last week, the people who follow Sarah, my wife, on Twitter received a message of gobbledegook which my younger son had bashed out on the keys and then pressed 'send' while she was out of the room," he told the audience.
"Within an hour, the Downing Street press office was called to ask if she had been the victim of a hacker, the BBC was reporting a mysterious 'tweet', and the online world was asking about various conspiracy theories."
"It started with our mistake and, of course, it was a mistake not to supervise the internet and we were taught a big lesson as a result of that," he said at an event to promote internet safety for children.
Shortly after the surprise tweet, Sarah Brown posted a message to reassure her online followers, saying: "In future I will turn my computer off when I am not using it - to save energy and avoid junior tweet interference."
- SAPA