Why @Dinner_Guest is probably a fake

This is why I love this medium. You put something out there. Sometimes you have all the holes pluggged. Sometimes you don’t. But blog comments and latterly, Twitter conversations, can be just incredible, and go on to form a patchwork of great information around a story – even creating new stories.

That’s what’s happening on the comments on my post yesterday about the @Dinner_Guest Twitter user who is tweeting like he’s a murderer in Brighton. I figured it was interesting enough to do a quick post on it. Maybe I’ve been sucked into a dumb marketing campaign, maybe I haven’t – I’m not overly worried. I’d rather put something out there that I think is interesting than not, and I knew for sure that in this case the community out there would be great at looking into this.

Thus, one Commenter, Scott Gould has some great thinking about whether Dinner Guest is real or fake which deserves repeating below. It just goes to show that this kind of community-powered journalism has so much potential.

1. IP Address – hello???

2. Uses Web, then does Twittelator. Clearly follows ppl. Then asks “How do I follow?” after people had said that he seemed a bit too proficient in Twitter – of course the fact that he already followed people shows this is a setup.

3. He thanks @f0rged for saying how to follow people using the web method, even tho he is using Twitterlator.

4. Uses American Psycho allusions, including the name dinner_guest

5. Speaks using classic ego talk, as if he is Patrick Bateman or Hannibal Lecter or something, unlike actual Serial Killers.

UPDATE: The profile in question now reads: “A fictional character born out of an artists mind. A meme experiment & analysis”