Twitter is a social media platform that allows you to basically say what you want, and those who follow you will see it. If your followers happen to think your "tweet" was funny, interesting, true, false or anything else, they can retweet it, and there followers will see it. Pretty simple right?
So now that we are done with Twitter 101, I want to rant about something that has been bugging the entire Twitter Universe, fake accounts. There are two different types of fake accounts (that I know of), a parody account and a mimic account. For example, @fakelavy is a parody account. People can deal with @fakelavy because you already know he is fake, but he also is acting like Peter Laviolette. There is not a single tweet that he sends out that I don't read thinking it is coming out of the Flyer's coach's mouth. Some parody accounts are good, some are bad, but anything that admits they are fake or have @fake in the Twitter handle, is okay with me.
Now we move onto the fake, mimic accounts. For example, Ken Rosethal from MLB on FOX is a very well known source for breaking news in the MLB. Ken's official Twitter handle is @Ken_Rosenthal, yet there are two (!) fake accounts for him, @KenRosenthal and @kenrosenthal. As you can see, it is very easy to get those confused, especially because they have the same picture as the official Ken Rosenthal account.
Whether we want to admit it or not, we have all retweeted a fake account once or twice, but right now is a bad time for Twitter. When trade deadlines come up or free agency hits is when every single fake account comes out to play. We understand you want to break the news quickly, so you retweet or credit them, but it is now up to us.
Plain and simple, we have to slow down and look at each person's account before you credit them or retweet them. If an official MLB insider only tweeted 18 times, you should know something isn't right. We need to slow down before it is too late, these fake accounts are taking over Twitter. Let's take it back! #TakeBackTwitter
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