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Stray Tweet Exposes Rwanda’s Paul Kagame’s Twitter Ghostwriter

Stray Tweet Exposes Rwanda’s Paul Kagame’s Twitter Ghostwriter

From The Washington Post

Paul Kagame has over 260,000 followers on Twitter, and has become well-known for using the service to engage with his followers. “I think it [Twitter] is very important from my perspective,” he told Wired last year. “I learn a lot from that because you are having free access to as wide opinion as the whole world has … I learn about people’s views, about challenges, and that goes beyond Rwanda itself.”

For the past few weeks, however, the Rwandan president hasn’t been tweeting, apparently taking a break from the service. That is, until Thursday morning, when something quite unusual – and possibly revealing – happened.

It began when Laura Seay, a political scientist with Colby College, approvingly tweeted of the work by Sonia Rolley, a journalist with RFI who has been covering the deaths of Rwandan dissidents. This tweet, in turn, prompted a response from an account named “@RichardGoldston.”

“‘Goldston’ was insulting Sonia in a number of ways,” Seay told me in an e-mail, “including a really bizarre attempt to embarrass or slut-shame her, implying that she had been dating Patrick Karegeya (the Rwandan dissident who turned up dead in South Africa on January 1) and that he had sultry details on their interactions.”

At this point Steve Terrill, another journalist who covers Rwanda, stepped in to ask that @RichardGoldston stop the “misogynistic harassment” of Rolley (you can read the tweets here, but note that the @RichardGoldston account has been deleted)

Read more at The Washington Post