Exploiting Shirley

I have a couple of Shirley Temple lenses on Squidoo so when I read late last week that 84-year-old Shirley Temple had just joined Twitter, I was thrilled!  I started following the account immediately.  Her posts so far were adorable and I was excited to be able to include them on a Twitter Follow module on one of my lenses.

Then, over the weekend, I (thankfully) happened to read that Twitter was duped.  Shirley Temple Black's spokesperson said she is not on Twitter.  I checked the account and, indeed, while the URL was the same and included Shirley's name, the identification and information on the account now belonged to a scumbag marketing company that shall remain nameless.

The great news is that today the Twitter account no longer exists.  But I'm still fuming, just a little, that someone would exploit a public figure the way they did.  I should have been suspicious (and I was, a little) that Shirley hadn't included her married name in the account.  She's gone by that name for many, many years and the "Shirley Temple" did have a slight exploitative ring to it.  The other good news is that the Twitter Follow module on the lens where I added it didn't work, and didn't display, so I wasn't responsible for leading any of its 10,000 or so followers to that bogus account.

As far as I'm concerned, Shirley Temple Black is a national treasure and I sincerely hope that the person who used her name will be caught and punished, but I can't imagine that will really happen. I'll just be even more cautious than usual in the future and not assume that just because a Twitter account says "verified," that makes it so.

Rant over.