Twitter Hijacked This Guy's Name And Photo To Make Fake Tweets Promoting Its New TV Product

We're sure Twitter meant no harm, but Philadelphia-based distance runner Neil Gottlieb is fuming.

Yesterday, Gottlieb was told by a friend that his Twitter account had been used in a blog post by Twitter promoting the launch of its new TV advertising product, which enhances TV ad buys by running Twitter campaigns in the same time-periods.

Twitter's blog showed an ad management dashboard with a tweet from Gottlieb that said:

"What is the song in the new @barristabar commercial? I love it!!”

But Gottlieb did not love it.

He didn't even know about it:

And then ...

Realizing they had screwed up, Twitter's blog writers fixed the blog post by deleting the fake Neil Gottlieb's tweet:

"Confusion"? Gottlieb didn't let Twitter's passive-aggressive non-acknowledgment of its error slide, either:

The same thing happened to William Mazeo, whos handle and image were portrayed as saying “I wish I could make fancy lattes like in the @barristabar commercial”:

The fake tweets were discovered by Jeff Elder of the San Francisco Chronicle. He managed to get this screengrab of them before Twitter made them disappear:

You can see there's a third account in there, @subhash_tewari, which also never appears to have tweeted anything about a Barrista Bar.

Mazeo got the last word: