“As of immediately I will stop tweeting until I find a way to properly manage this feed. I feel awful about this error. Won’t happen again.” – Ashton Kutcher
Sometimes a single tweet can undo all the good you have ever done and the cyber-world of anonymous faces can be pretty mean and unforgiving. Actor Ashton Kutcher learnt that the hard way on Wednesday when he tweeted to his over eight million followers: “How do you fire Jo Pa? #insult #noclass as a hawkeye fan I find it in poor taste!“
This rant was in response to the firing of Pennsylvania State University’s iconic football coach Joe Paterno (who is 84 years old). The coach was fired because he failed to effectively handle serious allegations of child molestation by one of his assistant coaches who had worked alongside him for many years.
Of course, once he realised why the coach was fired, he removed the tweet and apologized to his fans and stated that he would stop tweeting till he found a way to properly manage his feed.
In his defense, Ashton wrote on his blog post:
“Last night after returning home from work I walked by the television and simply saw a headline that Joe Paterno had been fired. Having no more information than that, I assumed that he had been fired due to poor performance as an aging coach. With that assumption (how dare I assume) I posted a tweet defending his career. As an advocate in the fight against child sexual exploitation, I could not be more remorseful for all involved in the Penn St. case. “Of course, now the star admits that even though virtually every tweet was posted by him personally, now he will have to turn it over to Katalyst Media, his production company, because, “Clearly the platform has become too big to be managed by a single individual,” he explained!