Last week Twitter removed an account claiming to be written by the president of the University of Texas at Austin, William C. Powers Jr., which had actually been written by editors of Texas Travesty, a student-run humor magazine at the university.
“I think it’s game over,” said Ross Luippold, the magazine’s editor in chief and a senior at the university, in an interview Thursday. “It was pretty popular — it actually had more followers than the student government’s” Twitter feed, he said. He said he received an e-mail message from Twitter notifying him that the account would be removed unless he could quickly send proof that he was Mr. Powers (which he’s not).
University administrators had contacted Twitter weeks ago asking it to remove the account, which it did just hours after The Chronicle first wrote about the parody. Mr. Luippold said it was “a little annoying” that university did not contact him, but chose to go to Twitter instead with its grievance.
“It seems like this opens us up to making fun of them even more mercilessly over the next year,” said Mr. Luippold, arguing that the magazine plans to have the last laugh. “There’s nothing that can stop us from doing cover-to-cover Powers parody.”
Another spoof university-president account — of John J. DeGioia, Georgetown University’s president — has not been suspended, even though officials there asked Twitter to shut it down. Andy Pino, Georgetown’s director of media relations, said last week that he believed that the account violated Twitter’s terms of service by not making it clear that it is a parody. Since then, however, the student running the parody account, Jack Stuef, has changed the account page, and has removed a link to the university president’s Web site. Mr. Stuef could not be reached Thursday for comment. —Jeffrey R. Young
