Tanner Friedman Wins Back Control Of Twitter Account
Tanner Friedman, the Farmington Hills public relations and marketing agency established in 2007 by former journalists and PR executives Don Tanner and Matt Friedman, has wrested control of the account @tannerfriedman on the Twitter social media site from the "John Doe" who created the account in January thanks to a federal lawsuit.
Tanner Friedman filed suit against the "John Doe" May 27 in federal district court in Detroit. The company didn't ask for monetary damages -- instead, it asked for the identity of the person who signed up for the account, and it asked to get control of the account back.
"We have our Twitter ID back and we will begin posting by the end of the day," Friedman said Wednesday midafternoon. "Twitter gave us the information."
On June 4, Federal judge Marianne O. Battani granted Tanner Friedman's request for leave to serve limited discovery upon a third party, Twitter, Inc., to determine the true identity of the Defendant, John Doe.
Based on information provided Monday by Twitter to Tanner Friedman, the identity of the person who signed up for the account isn't clear -- they used a clearly throwaway e-mail acccount at the low-priced Internet connectivity provider Juno.com -- but Twitter records showed the last login Internet address of the account, 65.44.161.222, was registered to Marx Layne Communications, where Tanner and Friedman both formerly worked.
"If a Twitter account was set up, it was not done with my knowledge or authority, and I'm looking into the matter," said Marx Layne managing partner Mike Layne. "I would not do this and did not do this."
Friedman said his company didn't sue Twitter because companies like Twitter aren't obligated to monitor and control what their users post. "It wouldn't have done us any good to sue Twitter," Friedman siad. "Only individual posters are responsible for their actions." What Twitter was responsible for, Friedman said, was "to disclose to us as much about the individual as they knew."
Tanner praised both the courts and Twitter for resolving the matter quickly -- in less than a month. "The system worked," he said.
The lawsuit stated that the tannerfriedman account was registered "on or near" Jan. 13 and posted a "false and defamatory statement." There were additional tweets on Feb. 17 and March 6, 23, 24 and 26. The John Doe also took actual tweets off Tanner Friedman employees' Twitter account and posted them on the tannerfriedman account to lend it an air of authenticity.
Said Tanner in a June 2 interview with the IT Report: "Before they were removed, the messages were far ranging but all were potentially damaging. Most re-wrote or twisted tweets from our personal pages or portions of blogs from TannerFriedman.com so that their meanings were lost or compromised. All of the tweets on the imposter page were designed to embarrass and-or put our firm in a negative light."
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