Ashton Kutcher used to be known for his tweets almost as much as his acting work. The That '70s Show alum became the first Twitter user to hit 1 million followers, in 2009. He often interacted with his then-wife Demi Moore (her now unfortunate Twitter handle being @mrskutcher) and posted intimated photos of her.
In 2011, though, Kutcher tweeted his disappointment that Penn State had fired head coach Joe Paterno in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal. "How do you fire Jo Pa? insult. no class. as a hawkeye fan I find it in poor taste," he posted (and later deleted. His followers were outraged that he could defend someone who had allegedly looked the other way when faced with allegations of Sandusky's abuse.
"As an advocate in the fight against child sexual exploitation, I could not be more remorseful for all involved in the Penn St. case," he posted after facing a fair amount of backlash. "As of immediately I will stop tweeting until I find a way to properly manage this feed. I feel awful about this error. Won't happen again." It was bit of a non-apology, and implied that his comment was simply an "error" in managment. Ooook.
Anyway, at a tech conference recently, Kutcher—who now has over 14 million Twitter followers—lamented the fact Twitter basically isn't any fun anymore. "Twitter's experience has changed for me, pretty drastically," he said. "It used to be sort of a personalized experience for me, a really personal experience that I could share. For lack of better verb, I think the media kind of fucked it up."
Kutcher also vowed to cut down on the number of people he follows and blamed the retweet button for all the advertising and commercial stuff that has permeated the social networking site. Hey, Ashton, no one is forcing you to use Twitter, and no one is forcing you to use it for shameless self-promotion. We think it's still a pretty good time.
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[via CNBC]
