All the Pretty Tweets: The True Story of Fake Cormac McCarthy
Twitter falls for a fake Cormac McCarthy account (again), bestowing upon it a blue checkmark of authenticity.
Cormac McCarthy famously shuns people and punctuation, but Twitter readily welcomed “him” as its own last week, when @CormacMcCrthy earned a blue checkmark of authenticity.
McCarthy, a writer who prefers to keep his life private while he writes bleak and brutal works such as The Road and Blood Meridian, is 88. He does not do readings, and he rarely gives interviews. So it was not terribly believable that he would tweet at the behest of a publicist named Terry, as the viral tweet that sparked a trending topic claimed.
The period-free tweet was too good for Twitter to resist, perhaps. The company has noted and corrected its error: “The account referenced was verified by mistake and that has since been reversed,” a spokesperson told PCMag.
The @CormacMcCrthy handle, which has been around since 2018, is now considered by Twitter to be a parody account and will have to abide by the company’s parody, newsfeed, commentary, and fan account policy, the spokesperson said. But Twitter did not explain why it verified the account on July 31, and not, say, on July 8, when the faux McCarthy was expounding on why kombucha never goes bad, or on March 31, when he railed against The Mandalorian.
Jack Dorsey himself fell for a different fake McCarthy account in 2012. Maybe he finally feels like he’s in better company, since this time, even Stephen King, who you would think would be more aware of these obvious Twitter traps, responded to Friday’s tweet.
Who is truly behind @CormacMcCrthy? We do not know. But we have learned some things along the way, besides never believing what you read on Twitter:
Cormac McCarthy was portrayed on an episode of Mike Tyson Mysteries…
…where he was a centaur.
The post-apocalyptic world of The Road is just as understandable if you put it on shuffle:
Reading The Road could destroy your life:
Or possibly save it:
And someone is finally fixing up McCarthy’s old house in El Paso:
Originally published at https://www.pcmag.com.
