The United Nations is pretty picky about who it follows on Twitter. Although the global organization has nearly 1.5 million followers, it only follows 536. Among them are the World Health Organization, Bill Gates, and former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
And, until earlier today, one big busty porn star.
The main Twitter account for the organization was spotted following the account of German adult actress Penelope Black Diamond, a.k.a @BigBustyStar.
It’s not entirely clear how or why the U.N. came to follow the 31-year-old porn performer, though it is not following her any longer. In the public interest (it’s your tax dollars that fund the U.N., after all), here’s some of our theories as to why the U.N. was keeping tabs on Black Diamond.
It was a huge mistake
The most likely, and most boring reason. Maybe someone clicked on the follow button on her profile by accident after one of her tweets popped up in a search. It’s a logical turn of events.
Account manager meant to follow from a personal account
There are many, many instances of people using their work Twitter account by mistake. Perhaps the person running the feed thought they were logged into their own account. It’s an easy mistake to make. It does raise questions as to why the person handling the U.N.’s account was checking out porn stars’ feeds at work.
The U.N. used an auto-follow tool
There exist myriad tools dedicated to automatically following people who follow your account, or use a certain term in one of their tweets. While it’s entirely possible Black Diamond used a certain word or phrase to trigger the U.N. into following her, it seems unlikely the U.N. uses such a tool. It only follows 536 people, and would likely have many more followees if it used such such software. It’s also very unlikely an auto-follow tool was used to follow back those who opted to follow the U.N.: Penelope Black Diamond does not follow the account. How embarrassing.
It was helping out the European Union
Earlier this year, the European Union voted against a ban on porn in the region. Who knows? Perhaps the U.N. was carrying out some background research on the EU’s behalf.
Twitter had a random blip
Maybe, just maybe, the notorious Twitter unfollowing bug (where it would erroneously unfollow accounts on your behalf) flipped on its head and added the U.N. to Black Diamond’s list of followers without either side knowing.
Black Diamond used the forced follow bug
A few years back, a Twitter bug allowed anyone to force another Twitter account into following them. For instance, I made Oprah Winfrey follow me for a few minutes before the bug was stamped out. Perhaps Twitter didn’t get around to restoring the U.N,’s legitimate list of people it was following after Black Diamond maybe possibly took advantage of the bug. As this bug was squashed years ago, though, this theory seems unlikely.
Black Diamond used to be someone else
It’s simple to switch the username, display name, and profile of a Twitter account, bringing your followers along for the ride. It’s a trick occasionally used by people who run parody accounts reacting to a certain event: delete your existing tweets, change your username, profile photo, and bio, and presto! You already have an audience with which you can share bad jokes and ads.
The chance that happened here is a remote one. I can’t fathom any circumstances under which the U.N. might have been following an account which converted to become the property of a porn star who started tweeting four years ago.
In all likelihood, someone at the U.N. was merely checking out a titillating Twitter account and hit the follow button by mistake. If the U.N. investigates how this happened, surely the perpetrator will be hoping they have diplomatic immunity.
Photo via Sean Davis/Flickr