Twitter is buzzing with the news that last night the Twitter accounts for Mad Men characters Don Draper (@don_draper) and Peggy Olson (@peggyolson) were taken down. At first the outrage was pointed towards the folks over at Twitter, with reports stating that it was because these accounts fall under their new spam restrictions – The accounts were not real people saying real things (yet all were promoting a similar product).
Twitter employees fired back that it wasn’t their initiative, but rather a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice issued by AMC. Apparently these twitter accounts were NOT all part of a marketing campaign for the show! I will say this, each of the accounts (there’s more than just Don and Peggy on Twitter) seems to have stuck to the character they were portraying. While AMC has the legal right to protect their brand, why ruin a good campaign? Especially one that is free?
Ben Kessler found the rest of the cast who had Twitter accounts and posted them on his blog. They are:
and
– Apparently a new Peggy Olson account has been created, this time with an underscore in her name. One of her first ‘tweets’ was in regards to the account suspension:
MG Siegler from VentureBeat was the first to report of the DMCA takedown:
Twitter has responded back to me on the issue. Apparently it wasn’t a spam issue at all, but rather a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice that Twitter’s support team responded to, co-founder Biz Stone tells me. I guess AMC didn’t like others playing the roll of its Mad Men characters besides the actors who play them on TV.
I wonder if this was the inspiration for the influx of fake Mad Men accounts (taken from SomeEcards.com):
I don’t think this is the end of this story….
UPDATE! Mario Parisé from the StrategicText blog has come forward to reveal that he has been twittering under the Paul Kinsey (@paul_kinsey) account. It is still (as of 12:45pm EST) online. He’s got a great post about it over on his site. Go check it out.
