Barack Obama | Media Culpa

Obama’s tweets will be archived on @POTUS44 – but the 46th President is an “egg”

We will soon find out who will replace Barack Obama as the President of the United States – Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Obama has been the first president to truly embrace social media in all its forms and when he steps down, Clinton or Trump will take charge of the Twitter account @POTUS. The account will keep its 11 million followers but the new President will start off fresh with a clean time line, no old tweets will be attached to the account.

Obama’s old tweets will not be deleted, instead they will be transferred to the @POTUS44 account where they will be archived by the National Archives and Records Administration in order to preserve the material for future generations. The same strategy is in place for the other accounts associated with the Obama administration, like the @whitehouse which will be archived at @whitehouse44.

Future archives are “taken”
If this strategy continues over time, then some accounts may suddenly get some extra attention. A Mr. Phillip Jay White holds the @whitehouse45 account and the future archives of the successor to Clinton/Trump is an anonymous “egg” on the @POTUS46 account.

Naturally, the National Archives and Records Administration will have no trouble getting control of these accounts when thay day comes, but it will be fun to see if any of these people will become active and take advantage of the potential Twitter fame.

Via Digital Trends.

Infographic: Barack Obama vs Mitt Romney on Twitter

The 2012 U.S. presidential election is a tight race with both candidates getting about the same amount of votes in recent election polls. During the election race, social media has played a very important role. Here is a quick infographic outlining the Twitter battle between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Obama has ten times as many followers but Romney has more mentions per tweet.

Click on the image for a larger version or here for a pdf.

The most retweeted tweet of all time

Yesterday, the NFL reached an agreement with the NFL Referees Association to end an ongoing lockout. Before that agreement was reached, temporary referees were used during the start of the season. But some calls by replacement referees were criticized. After one such questionable decision, Green Bay Packers lost a game on Monday evening, which lead Packers’ guard T.J. Lang to tweet this message.

This tweet has now become one of the most retweeted tweets of all time, currently at close to 100,000 retweets. One older tweet that had thousands of retweets, is the same-sex marriage tweet by Barack Obama that has been retweeted more than 61,000 times. (Update: I forgot about Justin Bieber. Never forget Bieber. As you see below, one of his tweets has 120k RTs).

However, the tweet that is still the most retweeted is this one by Justin Bieber with 120,000 retweets (found via Buzzfeed):

Barack Obama’s profile on Pinterest hijacked again

After a bit of confusion this week, I finally understood what had happened to Barack Obama’s profile page on Pinterest. It seemed as if the account had pinned several “non-presidential” images to a board, but in reality a user had taken advantage of a security flaw in Pinterest. When you invite another user to collaborate on a board, that board becomes visible on that user’s profile too. So an inactive account like Obama’s could be “hijacked” to include any board without the account owner even noticing it.

After that first incident, the person who managed the board that appeared on Obama’s page, removed it. But now it has happened again. Another board is visible on pinterest.com/barackobama and once again it does not belong to that account.

Having the President look like a fool on your site, can’t be good for business. Pinterest should change the procedure so that a user that has been invited to collaborate on a board actively has to agree that the board becomes visible on its profile.

Barack Obama brandjacked on Pinterest – updated

[Updated – see end of the post] Yesterday Mashable noted that Barack Obama had joined yet another social network, namely the much hyped Pinterest. At that point, the account had no boards. I must admit that I thought that it was an official account for the Obama/Biden campaign. I couldn’t for the life of me think that the campaign people and/or Pinterest would allow someone to snatch the username “barackobama” from the US President. But it seems both Mashable and I were wrong.

The Pinterest account has now posted one board, but it does not at all look like the kind of content you thought would be pinned by Obama. In fact, when you hold the cursor over the board you will notice that the link points to a board by another user: http://pinterest.com/mikestreet/bropin/ This board has some 440 pins, including some images that are NSFW.

Pin It

I don’t know how this is done technically. When I look at my own Pinterest profile I only see boards that are my own. But “mikestreet” has the very same board with the same images on his profile, so clearly this must be a fake Obama account. What do you think? Could there be another explanation?

Update: I emailed with Lauren Orsini who gave a reasonable explanation to what happened. The account is probably not fake at all, but the board seen above in my screen shot was put there as a joke by Mike Street. You see, there is a way to add other Pinterest users as collaborators to your boards and when you do, that board will appear on their profile too. This can be used with great effect if you are doing it to an inactive account, like a celebrity for example, they will not notice they have been added. So the Obama account was not paying attention that Mike added it as collaborator, making us believe that Obama had created a board named #BroPin. Lauren has written about that security flaw here – How to hijack popular brands on Pinterest for free publicity.

Although I don’t recommend that you do this on Pinterest, I must admit I was fooled. Well played!

AP: “Obama bin Laden killed”

It was probably inevitable that some news organizations would get the Obama/Osama names mixed up, but I didn’t expect it to be the Associated Press. In a news story that was published early this morning, AP says in a photo caption (my bold):

“Crowds climb trees and celebrate in Lafayette Park early Monday, May 2, 2011, in front of the White House in Washington after President Barack Obama announced that Obama bin Laden had been killed. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)”

The text has since then been republished by news outlets such as the Washington Post, the Denver Post and Independent Mail.

Update: Fox News made a similar mistake, see photo here: http://twitpic.com/4s76an