In a national poll of 1,200 registered voters conducted this past weekend, 52.5% percent of all respondents say that social media are harmful to the social development of today’s youth. More details here.

I’m all for anything where “relatively simple tools can help us all improve the quality of information on the Internet.” That’s what hypothes.is is all about, so if raising the quality of information online sounds pretty good to you, too, check it out.

The New York Post was one of about a zillion outlets that reported the other day about Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter gaffe, in which he wondered to his 8.2 million followers why Joe Paterno was fired as Penn State coach.

Assuming that Paterno was fired without knowing the circumstances of arguably the biggest sports story of the century was stupid enough. I mean, if you’re a big enough sports fan to care about Paterno, how can you not know about the Penn State story?

But let’s focus on the followup to the foolishness. According to the Post story, Kutcher wrote on his blog:

“Up until today, I have posted virtually every one of my tweets on my own, but clearly the platform has become too big to be managed by a single individual.”

Ummmm … what? The size of Twitter itself has absolutely nothing to do with whether you’re able to tweet for yourself or not. Zero. Less than zero. Yet, as the Post reported:

An embarrassed Kutcher announced yesterday he would be handing his Twitter feed over to people at his production company.

Hey, guess what: That’s exactly what people using Twitter don’t want to see: celebrity handlers tweeting for celebrities. That undercuts the whole notion of openness and authenticity and transparency that helps drive Twitter in the first place.

Back to Kutcher’s blog:

“When I started using Twitter, it was a communication platform that people could say what they were thinking in real time and if their facts were wrong the community would quickly and helpfully reframe an opinion. It was a conversation, a community driven education tool, and opinion center that encouraged healthy debate.

“It seems that today that Twitter has grown into a mass publishing platform, where ones tweets quickly become news that is broadcast around the world and misinformation becomes volatile fodder for critics.”

Hey, Kutcher: The conditions haven’t changed, the size of your audience has changed. Twitter is still a platform that allows people to say what they think in real time.

Tweeting about Paterno the way Kutcher did? It was dumb, but the tweet itself was nothing close to, say, what Imus said about the Rutgers women’s basketball team.

What’s really beyond dumb is Kutcher’s overreacting, his absurd explanations and the handing off of his personal Twitter account to others. He’d have been far better off with some apologetic tweets followed by some self-deprecating tweets and keeping his feed his own.

Sorry, Ashton: You and Rick Perry both stepped in it pretty good last week, but Perry did a far, far better job of scraping his boots clean.

I have no idea how McSweeny’s Internet Tendency escaped my notice till now, but it has. I think you’ll agree that there’s a ton of good reading to be had there. I mean, how can you not love a site that features seven bar jokes involving grammar and punctuation?

“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”
—John F. Kennedy