May 19, 2009 02:03 AM UTC

Newt's model of Twitter ignorance (Take note, RSC Colorado!)

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• by: Alan

A warning for all those litigious Colorado rightwingers embracing Twitter this year, from The Hill:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and former Michigan Republican Party Chair Saul Anuzis have threatened to sue a pro-Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) group over a posting on Twitter using their names.

Attorneys for Gingrich and Anuzis wrote a pro-EFCA group on Wednesday, asking them to disable a posting by the anonymously-owned “EFCANOW” handle, which asked followers to sign a petition supporting the labor legislation, and included Gingrich’s and Anuzis’s Twitter handles.

The suit marks a first for the political use of Twitter, which has taken off amongst lawmakers, political figures and interest groups since earlier in the year. The complaint gets to the heart of one of the most common practices of the site: directing a message toward another user – even if the two don’t know each other – by using an “@” sign.

“The posting falsely purports to have been written by Messrs. Gingrich and Anuzis and includes the Mark as well as the Twitter ‘handles’ of the foregoing individuals,” attorneys wrote in a letter. “The posting is deliberately designed to fraudulently induce readers into believing that…Messrs. Gingrich and Anuzis all support EFCA.”

The attorneys alleged that the posting, of which the authorship is unknown, violates the pair’s trademark and publicity rights, and invokes tresspassing and wire fraud laws, and maybe even so-called “RICO” laws, which are traditionally used to target organized crime groups…

Holy crap, RICO? The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act? Over a Tweet?

The problem is that the person who sent the “Tweet” in question was simply using the ‘direct message’ function in Twitter, which enables one to send a message directly to accounts prefaced with an ‘at sign’ (@). In this case, @newtgingrich.

I don’t claim that everyone on Twitter fully understands what they’re doing, but this was clearly not an intent to steal Gingrich’s identity, just to have a little perfectly legal fun with it.

Embarrassed once somebody explained to him what actually happened, Gingrich sent out this carefully worded Tweet a couple of hours later:

A false story was planted this morning about my sueing [sp.–Pols] twitter. This is totally false and we have repudiated it with the media

And that’s technically true–according to the letter sent by Gingrich’s lawyer, he’s threatening to sue the person who sent the “Tweet,” the domain name registrar, and the web hosting company that hosts the site the message directed to. So no, not suing Twitter itself–but it’s no less ridiculous.

The moral of the story? Well, someday, somebody’s going to pull this on Tweet novice Dave Schultheis, and he should probably take a deep breath before calling in Scott Gessler.