Fool me once, shame on you. Fool Rams fans with your fake Twitter antics twice? There’s a special circle of hell waiting for you, reserved for fame-chasing syncophants.
It’s pretty sickening, really. Twice already someone has registered RQuinn42 and tried to attach themselves to Robert Quinn’s newfound celebrity and soak up the love of the newly ecstatic Rams fans wanting to welcome to his team. The same thing has happened to unwitting Cardinals fans and Patrick Peterson (PatPeterson7), and new accounts for Dallas’ Tyron Smith (TySmith77) and San Francisco’s Aldon Smith (A_Smitty85) are highly suspect as well.
This generation of fans has grown up with the internet — and with the idea that people can be something very different from who they say they are. It’s an accepted risk, and our inborn bs-detectors are relatively sophisticated. But what these people are doing is pernicious. Here’s how they systematically break down our layers of distrust:
- Set up an account and tweet something to the effect of “Finally got Twitter, help me figure this out lol“
- Start tweeting to a bunch of known NFL players, including those on the team that just drafted you. Hope that one of them tweets you back so you can re-tweet it and build credibility.
- Tweet to as many media outlets as you can, explaining that your fake account “will be verified by Wednesday.” Hope that they endorse your fakery to the fan base. (ESPN Radio’s Brian Stull got suckered here, and the Arizona Republic’s Kent Somers got hooked by the Pat Peterson account.)
- Start fake twitter conversations between your multiple fake twitter accounts. Send out appeals like “Hey follow my boi @PatPeterson7 just texted me and said he only has 600 followers lol.” Then, from your PatPeterson7 account, RT this and say something like “Follow @RQuinn42 he legit“
- Make sure you heavily incorporate terms like “bruh” when tweeting to white fans.This term of post-racial brotherhood will have them swooning.
- Hope that a very famous athlete starts following you, giving you their seal of approval.
Sadly, Steven Jackson and Larry Grant were both suckered in by the Quinn impersonator. And that’s how I was eventually suckered in a second time, seeing their names in the “Followers” column.
Now there’s a third Twitter account for Quinn, or “reserved for Quinn” by so-called family friends. It even has a facebook page set up with photos of a very happy Quinn posing with multiple people and smiling. Who’s buying?
