Let me preface this by saying that I don't mean to be a debbie downer. That being said, I saw this image shared on one of my friend's Facebook walls.
So, being one who uses twitter, I went to Will Smith's "handle" as shown in the image to the right with the intent of Retweeting it, but here's who's there, as shown below.
Did I spell something wrong? I checked, and I double checked, and caps don't matter, so that couldn't be it.
Next I went to Will Smith's website, the only content of which is a field to sign-up for an email list, and a link to his Facebook.
Surely if Will Smith had a Twitter account, it would be on one or the other, but I find mention of one on neither.
I even searched on Twitter, and found nothing but fake and parody accounts.
At this point I actually googled "does will smith have a twitter", which you can too if you click on the link. While there were a number of sites that provided an answer (WikiAnswers giving one), the site that probably satisfied my piqued curiosity at this point was kgb answers answering the question (despite misspelling account).
This answer was good for me particularly because of the time stamp for its most recent update being about a month ago.
Which brings me to the original image.... Where did it come from?
And here's the thing, the real questions are does it matter and does it affect the message? I would argue it depends on who's reading it. Some (if not most) people probably won't care to the point where the message loses its meaning, this issue and incident in particular. You can check out those exact sentiments at Lipstick Alley, in comments about a post on this image.
However, in an age where it's so easy to share content, I would say we are being called on as users to a higher degree of accountability than before, not just in representing ourselves and those we know, but making sure that any content we share representing anyone and their voice, friend, stranger, celebrity, etc., unless it's parody or obviously a joke, is truthful.
-JR
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