Yesterday, Jimmy Kimmel hosted the fourth round of his feature "Celebrities Read Mean Tweets," in which real, live celebrities read negative Twitter messages about themselves aloud. Journalist and writer Rebecca Dana found some of them so funny that she suspected they were written by professionally funny people. So she checked on Twitter to see if any professional comedians were behind them.
Instead, it seemed that no one was: Some of these tweets or the accounts purportedly behind them didn't exist.
What better use of a calm Friday afternoon than to take the investigation further, through the whole history of the feature? Many of the accounts, on examination, had been suspended. That's not too surprising, given that they had been publicly highlighted for rudeness. But a few accounts had only posted one message—the one that amazingly made it on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Maybe they were set up as burners, for the writers to dismiss one star of choice and get out of there? A few accounts and tweets never turned up at all.
The first round of "Celebrities Read Mean Tweets" seems to be clean. All 14 of those posts are held by real, probably mean, Twitter users, who are still actively griping. The next set also looks pretty solid, with only two dubious accounts. But by the third round of "Celebrities Read Mean Tweets," three of the posts were suspicious, and one seems certainly fake. In the fourth and most recent installment, it's likely that four of the 13 posts are fake, with one more very suspicious contender.
The standouts of possible sham slander are in the source, with the videos of celebrities reading mean tweets following each set.
It's hard to believe there's not enough genuine negativity on Twitter for the show to work with. Let that chaotic realm of inanity do the work for you, comedians. Take the afternoon off.
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