Abraham Riesman (
@abrahamjoseph), a producer and journalist in New York City, was surprised to wake up on October 9, 2012 and discover that his own personal posts on Twitter were placed together with a huge story on a rapist on a TV station's website.
The TV station is Houston's KHOU Channel 11, which has been following the trial of former police officer Abraham Joseph.
The 28-year-old was convicted for raping a waitress in January 2011 with the final judgment rendering him guilty and ordering life imprisonment.
The station placed a story on the life sentence with the hashtag
#abrahamjoseph. Unfortunately, Riesman uses the handle @AbrahamJoseph on his Twitter account, where he shares casual posts and other sentiments completely unrelated to the rape case.
Searches on the rape convict naturally led to posts and comments by the unsuspecting journalist.
People looking at the KHOU page might immediately think that Riesman is the same person as the rapist since they share the same name online.
Betabeat called up Riesman on the phone to get all the details. At that moment, the Twitter widget continued to correlate his tweets with stories on the rape trial and conviction.
Shocked, Riesman asked KHOU Channel 11 to remove the correlations via Twitter.
Riesman said to Betabeat, ?This is a classic example of old media folks desperately trying to understand new media and basically falling on their faces.?
He added: ?Basic logic dictates that there is no way this is Twitter feed. For one: look at my avatar. It?s a really white, red-headed gentleman with glasses and the fact that this is a TV station would convey they have some visual sense of what this convicted rapist would look like. Also, how would I be tweeting? And perhaps even more importantly: why would I be tweeting at midnight about Homeland??
KHOU was quick to realize the problem and immediately removed the attachments made through search engines. Riesman was thankful for the positive changes made and quickly posted on Twitter:
