Twitter
The Texas teen known as "Alex from Target" who became
Internet famous overnight might not have been a marketing stunt after all.
Yesterday CNET reported that a firm called Breakr Nation was behind the photo that made "Alex from Target" a viral sensation.
The firm's founder and CEO, Dil-Domine Jacobe Leonares, took credit for what he called "one of the most amazing social media experiments ever" in a post on LinkedIn (which has since been edited to backtrack some of his initial claims).
He said that Alex had given permission for his photo to be taken and that the company asked a Twitter user in London tweet it.
But Alex and the Twitter user, @auscalum, deny knowing anything about the company. Alex posted this on twitter last night:
And @auscalum tweeted this:
When asked for proof of Breakr's involvement in the stunt Tuesday, Leonares told Mashable, "The conversation between @auscalum and us has be deleted. I should have screen-shotted it but she does not work for us. We just reached out to her to post the picture."
But @auscalum says she found the photo on Tumblr.
Buzzfeed scrubbed the Internet and discovered that the first person to post the photo was Twitter user @brooklynjreiff.
"Brooklyn R., from Prosper, Texas, says she snapped a photo of #AlexFromTarget after her best friend, Alanna P., went to the same Target store (4885 Eldorado Pkwy in Frisco, TX) that day and dished about how 'GORGEOUS' he was," Buzzfeed reports.
Breakr now claims that it promoted the hashtag #AlexfromTwitter using its army of followers. But that seems unlikely, considering Breakr only has 1,291 followers on Twitter.
Target has denied any involvement in the stunt.
We reached out to Breakr for comment and will update when we hear back.
