Tony La Russa sues Twitter over alleged fake tweets

Let he who has not been fooled by a fake Twitter page cast the first stone.

Yet, though Kanye West has demanded that Biz Stone and friends do something about fake feeds, St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa has gone one step further.

He's suing.

According to the Associated Press, La Russa who is, let's not forget, a lawyer, was appalled to discover someone had set up a Twitter account allegedly bearing his name and a sick sense of humor.

Tony La Russa is on the right

(Credit: CC SD Dirk)

According to the complaint, filed last month in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco, one tweet of the now now-deleted account read, on April 19: "Lost 2 out of 3, but we made it out of Chicago without one drunk driving incident or dead pitcher."

For those of you who don't follow baseball closely, Cardinals pitcher Darryl Kile died in his hotel room in 2002 of an arterial blockage. While relief pitcher Josh Hancock was killed in a car accident, after which his blood-alcohol level was said by authorities to have been twice the legal limit.

Quite a sense of the jolly, this Twitterer.

However, unlike other fake Twitter pages, the fake La Russa feed did apparently include a few words that read: "Bio Parodies are fun for everyone."

It will be interesting, should the matter ever come to court, what weight might be given to this alleged disclosure.

In his lawsuit, La Russa allegedly claims that the tweets were "derogatory and demeaning" and that the feed damaged his trademark rights.

However, it seems as if he is giving an intentional walk to the person who actually created the fake page. Which is an interesting decision.

[Lucknowlars]

The drunk driving reference may also have been pointed at LaRussa's DUI in Florida. His field sobriety test was recorded and it's hilarious.

[umbrae]

Parodies are allowed by law. If the user made any reference to it being a parody then I am not sure he can do much.

[techman21]

Do we really want Twitter and other service providers to be monitoring content and deciding what's appropriate or not and whether someone is really who they say they are? There are many duplicate names in this world...

[groink_hi]

Solution: Do what the South Koreans do: NATIONAL ID! It is against South Korean law for social web sites to allow people to create accounts without a national ID number. This helps on many levels - from impersonation of famous people to protecting boys from pedophiles.

Think about it... Famous people would need to create accounts on EVERY SOCIAL NETWORK, in order to nail down its identity on the site. Many famous people are not on-line. I for one don't have a Twitter account, and I think many others don't. I don't think people have to go around nailing down their identities before someone else does. I think the U.S. should seriously look into some form of identity authentication. There may actually be a market for a social network start-up to set the precedence, by for example requiring a Verisign or similar personal certificate in order to register for an account. I'd certainly sign up on that system.

[bedney42]

Even here in St. Louis, where Beer + Baseball == God + Rapture, this is being treated as 'roll your eyes' ridiculous.

Get back to managing Tony...