The Agency has Spoken: CIA Joins Twitter and Butters up the Masses with a Sassy Tweet

by Sandy Hubbard

Knock, knock? Who’s there?

The CIA.

What the?

Yep, now you can’t even go on Twitter without the Agency dropping by.

The official CIA (blue checked for verification) just started a Twitter account. Their first tweet was:

“We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.”

Soon after, the tweet scored a quarter of a million retweets and over 145,000 favorites.

We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.

— CIA (@CIA) June 6, 2014

Apparently the masses like that sassy humor…or they were trying to butter up the CIA.

The Twitter account and a new Facebook account joins their other social media accounts on Flickr and YouTube as well as the agency’s website, as reported by The Washington Post.

Interestingly, the CIA had to file an impersonation report to get hold of the @CIA account for their own use. Having filed impersonation reports when spammers were using my name and likeness, I wonder if the CIA had to do what I did, which was to prove my identity to Twitter and then wait 7 days. It would have been interesting to find out how the CIA proved that it was indeed the legitimate agency.

Although @CIA has 472,000 followers as I write this, I will not be following the account. Unless the CIA wants to follow me back, have some conversations, and meet my friends, I find it fairly pointless to follow accounts that just broadcast and don’t interact.

That’s why they call it SOCIAL media.

Anyway, good luck @CIA.

(That’s just me buttering them up.)

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Sandy Hubbard is Print Futurist for Print Media Centr and helps facilitate #PrintChat, which is held every Wednesday at 4 p.m. ET on Twitter.