Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Ashton Kutcher Cheated On Twitter Race


I guess a lot of people wanted CNN to win the race to 1 million followers on Twitter. Someone from CNN has said that they are the true winners and that Ashton cheated his way to victory. How do you cheat? Well as someone who doesn't use Twitter, the best I can explain it is this. Apparently once you sign up as a follower on Ashton's Twitter account you are stuck. Unless you completely give up your account you are always going to be stuck following him. It is kind of like those gym memberships that you sign up for but never use. Each month that automatic billing kicks in and each month while you sit in front of your computer eating your 14th donut of the day and look at the charge on your bank statement you vow to figure out some way to cancel that membership.

Well, CNN allows you to stop following them at any time you want, and so because people have a choice, someone from CNN feels they are the big winners. They do have a point, but does it really matter? Both parties got what they wanted. Ashton got more attention from the press and increased fame and CNN got to be considered cool because Ashton challenged them to a race and they probably attracted younger viewers.

I wonder who will be the first to 2 million.

17 comments:

Clanger said...

eh, who really cares. It was all for a good cause :)

palealebrew10 said...

"I wonder who will be the first to 2 million."

I can hear Spencer's prayers.

Wzzy said...

Actually, Enty, you (or your source) is wrong about this one.

Twitter put stops in place during the race to prevent people from following and unfollowing both Ashton and CNN. That's because there was a prize for bring the millionth follower, and they didn't want people gaming the system by unfollowing and refollowing.

For whatever reason, Twitter itself is having trouble with Ashton's account with respect to unfollowing, as noted on the Twitter status site.

It's not possible, on a user level, to prevent people from unfollowing you. Ashton may be guilty of other things, but not this one. You should edit the name (and content) of your post accordingly.

nunaurbiz said...

Look up crimeinterrupte (no "d" on the end) at Twitter and follow my friend. She'd like to have 2 million!

I told her to get Ashton to follow her so his million would soon follow her :-D

mamao said...

Yup. What Wzzy said.. You can't prevent people from unfollowing you.

Unknown said...

He is such a douche. No wonder his movies suck.

Anonymous said...

I can't stand Ashton.

nunaurbiz said...

I wasn't even tempted to follow him on Twitter cos he's so obnoxious.

KellyLynn said...

I just don't get why this is such a big deal. For years, people have been kicked off of message boards and out of chat rooms for essentially spamming "Join my group/site/whatever".

The only difference between those twits and these twits is that Ashton and CNN are more famous.

Judi said...

Neither side has increased fame because of this. That's b.s. People were either interested in participating or not. Except for a weeks worth of bragging rights, neither side gained anything.

IsraLuv said...

all ashton and CNN have brought to Twitter is this notion that twitter is a popularity contest when in fact - it is all about the content, engaging your followers, responding to them and creating dialogue.

high school is over - get over this popularity contest and start "talking" to your followers.

if not - you are then totally missing the point of twitter.

Unknown said...

I experienced "The Unremovable Ashton Lockdown" the day after the contest ended...

I've followed CNN since they tweeted their first tweet but was curious as to what Ashton's feed would be like and subscribed to him as well. Then, the day after the contest ended I tried to remove myself from his feed about 13 times before giving up. I tried it again the next day and it worked just fine...

Anyhoo, my point is that I chose to follow him for the sake of the contest and then after everything was over I chose to unsubscribe, which I assume is what a lot of folks did, so I fail to see any of this so called "cheating" playing a roll in anything. If you hadn't chosen to subscribe to him, you wouldn't have gotten stuck and then once it was over it was easy as pie to remove your self. *shrug*

mooshki said...

As Jenn said, it doesn't matter what it did for either of them, what matters is the 10,000 people who will get mosquito nets to protect them from malaria. Whatever his reasons, Ashton did a good thing.

Colleen said...

I accidentally subscribed to CNN and they wouldn't let me unsubscribe until the next day when the race was over! I kept getting an error message. I never tried to unsubscribe from Ashton though...

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Jerry said...

I wonder who will be the first to 2 million.Tila Tequila.

Jessica said...

Yep, what Wzzy said. Also, the normal growth of Twitter over the last several weeks have left it extremely buggy and over capacity at times and I have been unable to follow non-celebs for days at a time as recently as the last 3 days. I also didn't receive updates from many people I was following for a week. Lots and lots of bugs, but lots of lies being told about the Ashton/CNN thing, such as this one about him cheating. If anything CNN cheated. They didn't even own the Twitter account that Ashton was competing with until a few days before the contest, and it already had 100's of thousands of followers. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/15/confirmed-cnn-acquires-cnnbrk-twitter-account/

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