Stop Twitter Spam

June 26 Update – The fake Tina Fey account (@tina_fey) has been suspended.

It’s unclear what happened here but Tina Fey’s Twitter account was somehow linked to @rongoodz. Here’s what I’ve been able to piece together… According to Valebrity (a site that verifies that celebrity Twitter accounts are who they claim to be), the official Tina Fey Twitter account is (was?) @tinafey (not to be confused with @NotTinaFey, which used to be @tinafey).

At about 9:45 am PST, Tina Fey’s Twitter account looked like this:

Update:  After further research, it appears that the @tinafey Twitter account is legitimate but it’s been inactive since it was reclaimed a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday, there were several people complaining that @tinafey was replaced by @rongoodz in their Following list.

And we have this tweet by the mysterious Ron Goodz…

And now there’s a new Tina Fey Twitter account but the Twitter id is now @tina_fey (not @tinafey).

But there is something weird about this new account.  As of the writing of this blog post, there are only five updates and the account is only following one person – Ron Goodz!

Was this just a big technical glitch, possibly related to the maintenance that Twitter ran last night?  Did someone hijack Tina Fey’s account?  Is @tina_fey the real Tina Fey? Stay tuned.

Updates:

• June 6: Twitter just announced Verified Accounts. Maybe they should include Tina Fey’s account in the Beta.
• June 7: The @rongoodz account is now suspended.
• June 8: No big surprise here but the @tina_fey Twitter account is clearly bogus.  The Profile URL has been changed to a bit.ly link that points to – wait for it – a Ron Goodz page on Amazon.  Not only that, the fake account is spreading lies about 30 Rock.

• June 24 – The fake tina_fey account is still active and the person behind this continues to promote links selling Ron Goodz’s music.  The bit.ly link shown below is a link to iTunes.

• June 26 – The fake Tina Fey account (@tina_fey) has been suspended.