While hockey fans have enjoyed the tweets of NHL players like @MartinHavlat, @Sully26 and @dellis39, word comes this morning that @tjoshie, which claims to be the account for St. Louis Blues forward T.J. Oshie, is not the real thing – despite the “Verified Account” label that Twitter has stamped on that profile page.
Twitter launched the “Verified Account” service as a way to avoid confusion around the proliferation of fake celebrity accounts, such as the hilarious @BrianBurke, which lit up the hockey world a few months ago. Twitter’s claim?
With this feature, you can easily see which accounts we know are ‘real’ and authentic. That means we’ve been in contact with the person or entity the account is representing and verified that it is approved.
But when contacted this morning about @tjoshie’s veracity, the St. Louis Blue’s PR staff could not have been more adamant in their response – “TJ Oshie DOES NOT Twitter“.
What will be interesting to see is how Twitter handles this issue. They don’t clarify exactly how they qualify an account as “Verified”, so perhaps some standards will need to be defined to avoid confusion going forward.
UPDATE: The account in question has been suspended by Twitter, but after the jump I’ve got a screen-shot of how it looked…
Note the “Verified Account” label, exactly where Twitter says it’s supposed to be.