/ 6 February 2010

Top five Twitter gaffes

The past year has seen been a string of slip-ups on the micro-blogging service, from cricketers to Vodafone staff

1: In July 2009, Darren Bent of Tottenham berated his boss Daniel Levy on — putting him in line for an £80 000 fine. Can anyone top that for the cost of one tweet?

2: In October 2009, England cricket all-rounder Tim Bresnan hit the expletive button on Twitter after being ribbed by a fellow user about his weight. He later apologised.

3: In July 2009, Australian cricketer Philip Hughes told Twitter that he had been dropped from the Ashes team of the third Test before it needed to be revealed. Management wasn’t best pleased at him telling England what to expect.

4: In March 2009, Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, was fined $25 000 for criticising the referees via Twitter during a game. He’s reckoned to be the first to have been fined by a sports league for what he said on Twitter.

5: In April 2009 the Daily Telegraph set up a “Twitterfall” for its coverage of the budget, in which it tried to include any tweets with the tag “#budget”. Unfortunately Twitter users spotted that it was unmoderated, and embarrassed the paper and its owners with a stream of tweets such as “Breaking news: Barclay Brothers to pick up your tax bill in unprecedented act of philanthropy. #Budget” — and worse.

And the latest: Vodafone UK was forced to issue a stream of apologies after an employee in its Stoke office spotted an unattended keyboard and typed a homophobic tweet — which happened to be the @VodafoneUK account with (at the time) more than 8 500 followers … And you know what? It’s really sorry. – guardian.co.uk