Twitter Really Needs To Find A Way To Deal With Stuff Like This

Parody is fun - until it gets malicious

If you’ve been looking for basketball news, you’ve probably seen the Juwan Howard news/rumors this morning.

A lot of stuff has swirled around but most of it comes down to an alleged altercation between Howard and Michigan’s strength and conditioning coach Jon Sanderson.

We’ve seen suggestions that Howard is about to be fired or will step down and for all we know that could happen.

Or, rumors being rumors, not.

One of the sources on Twitter that has promoted this is a parody account of journalist Jon Rothstein.

As far as we know, the real Rothstein is a straight shooter. We’ve never seen anything to indicate that he’s not.

But you can’t say that about the parody guy.

If you’re a parody account, Twitter/X rules require you to mention that in your bio, and he does - sort of.

You can see the original/real Rothstein account here. And if you click here, you see the parody.

See the difference?

The parody is Jom.Rothstein and in fact the word parody is tucked in at the end along with another bit of description.

Otherwise though, he rips off the entire look and feel of Rothstein’s Twitter feed and is clever enough to treat some of his posts as breaking news.

So he did this with the Howard stuff. He also did it with Iowa’s Fran McCaffery. In both cases, he mocked their inability to control their tempers, which is fair game. They have some serious and unresolved emotional issues that erupt from time to time.

But he has done some other stuff to that’s distinctly unkind. He can’t be charged legally because he does identify himself as a parody account. Still, he posted something in October that we thought really crossed the line. We weren’t sure how to address this but felt then that it should be and the Howard stuff kind of brought it back to the foreground.

Specifically, he posted that Duke’s Kyle Filipowski was under NCAA investigation for point shaving.

Keep in mind that he did so while using the exact look and feel of Rothstein’s account, including Rothstein’s photo.

Obviously you could click through and see that it is a parody account, but he exploits Rothstein’s look and feel so exactly, and treats his “JomBombs” like breaking news well enough that they come across as legitimate posts from Rothstein.

It’s one thing to make fun of college coaches, who so often need to have their pomposity punctured, but going after teenagers like that is frankly disgusting.

*****

Well let’s back up for a second.

Turns out that that particular post came from another guy who is ripping off the look and feel of Rothstein’s account, although not as precisely.

Either way, the point is the same. We agree with Elon Musk on freedom of speech - the more the better. It’s important to allow idiots to expose themselves and the best way to do that is have people pick their idiocy apart, in full view of the general public. All good!

However, the precise visual replication of someone’s account, including their head shot, in order to sucker people to fake news, should not be allowed.

Perhaps Rothstein could find a way to change the look and feel of his feed to make it very difficult to use. We’re not sure how exactly to do that, but there’s bound to be a way to either make it very clear that this is the only legitimate Rothstein account.

Here’s a thought: use a QR code with each post that links to a page that absolutely verifies that the data comes from the original poster.

That page could read something like “This is NOT a parody account. Any news linked here is legitimate and sourced.” Theoretically, CBS’s programmers could do this for every CBS account and use a different QR code for each one to validate. No QR, no validation statement, no worries. It’s just poor attempts at humor.

Or alternatively, Twitter could just insist that a parody account cannot rip off the precise look and feel of the poster it seeks to mock and emulate and, not incidentally, get free traffic from. The parodist could still parody, but he couldn’t sell fake news as real information quite so easily.

That would respect the rights of the parodist and the rights of the poster. How about it, Elon?

Update - it occurs to us that a simple way to deal with the parodists is simply to make the image say that it’s IP property of CBS and then threaten to sue the pants off of anyone who lifts or modifies the image. That won’t solve verification but it would solve the look and feel issue.