The internet continues to baffle and comically anger Justine Bateman. The Family Ties star and manic blogger is calling people "shithead" and "human waste" for spamming her Twitter homepage, unaware she's seeing a new feature announced over a month ago.
What's especially funny about Bateman's tantrum is that she's lashing out at what's supposed to be an elite A-list: People selected first by Twitter to be part of a limited testing group for a new "re-tweeting" format, and then selected again by people Bateman follows, in the form of re-posted tweets.
When Twitter announced this feature in an August 13 blog post, it said re-tweets would now use the picture of the original tweeter, instead of the re-tweeter, but would be clearly labeled, and that one could turn the feature off. But the labeling wasn't clear enough for Bateman. After seeing repeated incoming posts from tech blogger John Gruber, since he had been re-tweeted by people she follows, Bateman called him a "shithead" and "human waste." (Gruber himself is famously an aficionado of this sort of name-calling, adding an additional wrinkle of humor to the situation.) Humorist and branding whiz Tim Siedell was dubbed a "jackass" by Bateman, who further warned,
I'm set to flame this incident all over the Internet. I suggest for the sake of your reputation on-line, YOU GET YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT TOGETHER and stop this attempt to shove your posts into other people's feeds.
Awesome.
Twitter Inc., which is still experimenting with this re-tweeting format, should keep in mind that Bateman isn't the sharpest test subject in the lab. She flipped out at rebloggers on Tumblr without taking the time to grok the blogging service's culture of quoting and of editing quotes. Later, Bateman, behind on her memes, lashed out at a fan who tried to praise her "white whine." Easily confused though Bateman may be, Twitter should probably take the time to create an "opt out" button simple and obvious enough for even her to use. Because God help you, Twitter Inc., if Mallory turns her e-guns on you.
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