Gurpreet Banwait
Contributor
The war of words is on between the official York Federation of Students (YFS) twitter account and its fake surrogate.
Fake Twitter account YFS Public Relations, or @YFSglobalPR, claims to represent students but often tweets about YFSlocal68, the confirmed official account of the York Federation of Students (YFS).
A recent YFSglobalPR tweet may have confounded some students, however: “PLS note @yfslocal68 account is fake. We at the YFS are the only ones who can speak, act, and think on behalf of the students at #yorku.”
YFSglobalPR has 318 followers, nearly double the number of followers for the YFS’ actual account.
The fake account has escalated the situation with several inflammatory tweets, including, on Oct. 4, “In Ottawa lobbying. By lobbying I mean giving hundreds of MPs the finger and screaming the students united will never be defeated.”
The YFS has responded by repeatedly tweeting “Pls note yfsglobalpr is not an official twitter account of the York Federation of Students.”
Krisna Saravanamuttu, the president of the YFS, called the situation “unfortunate” and noted that there is nothing the YFS can do about YFS- globalPR because “apparently Twitter allows for fake accounts.”
“The reason [the YFS] set up the twitter account is to inform the members of the general public about the work of the YFS. It is a bit immature and inappropriate that someone has set up a fake account and is spreading false information to our members,” said Saravanamuttu.
He said that he is not going to speculate who is behind the YFS- globalPR. Their identity remains unknown.
Saravanamuttu noted that the only thing the YFS can do is to continue to provide York students with truthful and relevant information.
I enjoyed reading your article very much. Fake twitter accounts
are a problem in soceity not affecting just York University.
Keep up the good work.