If you’ve been living under a rock the past few days, you’ve probably been spending a lot of time on Twitter (there is WiFi under rocks now) and watched with glee as @BurgerKing and @Jeep were hacked, probably by the same person. Never one to shy away from a silly, vacuous controversy, MTV jumped on board the corporate account hack-wagon buzz today by pretending that their own account was hacked by an overzealous BET fan with a tenor that aligned perfectly with the voice behind the real hacks.
While some were fooled, it came out pretty quickly that the whole thing was a prank. J.P. Lespinasse, self proclaimed “social media pugilist” for BET revealed the prank before it started in a now deleted tweet and @MTV tweeted a mea culpa. MTV and BET are both owned by Viacom, so while Sumner Redstone may not have signed off on the stunt himself, the hacked acccount meme is officially an instrument of “the man.”
Some people were annoyed, including whoever runs the Denny’s Twitter account. BuzzFeed seemed put off that day’s events amounted to a publicity stunt, but we’re guessing that’s because they fell for it initially and tweeted about it. Even Anonymous felt the need to chime in, tweeting “A hacker wouldn’t even waste their time to hack your sorry ass accounts on twitter @MTV @BET Get a life” from the @AnonymousGlobal account.
In less than 36 hours, the online outlook towards these corporate twitter hacks has gone from frenzied excitement to bored annoyance. Seems it’s all in fun until somebody tries to make money off it. At the end of the day MTV has proven that they continue to be the best at what they do: co-opting authentic cultural movements into corporatized units of consumption for commercial gain.
[via Daily Dot]
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Michael Kolberg is The Sprawl Editor at Toronto Standard. Follow him on Twitter for jokes @mikeykolberg.
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