Governor’s Gaffe?

How do you spell #oops?

Yesterday, I mentioned that the new governor of Florida, Rick Scott, was holding a Twitter Town Hall. Since I had some free time, and was interested in what he would use his 140 characters to say, I tuned in. A lot of people did.

As the more than 30-minute session drew to a close, reports estimated that questions were coming in at a rate of two per second. Now, nobody could answer that many queries in one half-hour sitting, but the deluge gave the governor a great excuse to avoid some of the more pointed interrogations.

I’ll leave the political punditry about which he addressed, which he avoided, and which he ignored to others; I just want to highlight a couple of updates that Florida’s new governor decided were poignant enough to share with all of his followers.

The moment getting most of the press was towards the end of the Twitter Town Hall where Mr. Scott—apparently accidentally—Retweeted a question calling him, “jackass.” Now, I assume it was an accident, because moments later, the update had been deleted from the governor’s stream.

One of these things is not like the other.

You can also see it in this shot from the site that Ron Sachs Communications put together to view all submitted questions next to Governor Scott’s feed.

Executive error.

But the Retweet I think everyone missed was the one which originated from a parody Rick Scott account. I don’t think Florida’s new head of the executive branch really wants Floridians to move to Canada for better health care, do you?

Reverse snowbirds?

Mistake? Probably. Entertaining? Definitely. The ease for errors during something like this is pretty high. Especially when you don’t bother updating more than 24 hours later. But we can talk about correcting Twitter mistakes on the ‘morrow, on the Web.