Twitter Hall Of Shame

By his own admission, Marcus Higgins was “mad at the situation” surrounding the shooting death of Trayvon Martin when he posted what he thought was the address and phone number of the man who shot Martin. Higgins tweeted the information more than 100 times on March 23, and film director Spike Lee retweeted it.

But Higgins (and Lee and others who retweeted him) should have counted to 10 and checked their facts. The address led to the home of an elderly Florida couple, David and Elaine McClain, who have lived there for years. The unwanted, sometimes hostile attention triggered by Lee’s retweet caused them to fear for their lives.

Higgins initially refuted reports that he posted the wrong address. But when the celebrity gossip show “Inside Edition” apparently contacted him, Higgins recanted and apologized repeatedly, insisting that he will personally write to the Florida couple, too. As of now, however, Higgins hasn’t deleted his erroneous tweets. Neither has Lee.

UPDATE, 9:40 p.m.: Lee just apologized for his retweet. “I Deeply Apologize To The McClain Family For Retweeting Their Address. It Was A Mistake. Please Leave The McClain’s In Peace. Justice In Court.” But he still has not deleted the tweet with the McClains’ address.

UPDATE, March 29: Lee “agreed to compensate the McClains for their loss and for the disruption into their lives. He’s taken full responsibility.”

You have the right to remain silent on Twitter. Anything you say about pornography and your supervisors can and will be used against you. If you do not understand these rights, you will lose your job as a law enforcer, just like Luis Pagan.

The Fort Lauderdale, Fla., police officer was caught tweeting with porn stars and criticizing his bosses on the social network. Even worse, he committed his crime of communications stupidity while on duty. The department initially suspended Pagan after the South Florida Times broke the story and eventually fired him for the breach.

Minnesota teenager Mike Stone might argue that he should be inducted into the Twitter Hall of Fame for the Twitter publicity stunt that made him briefly famous. But inviting a porn star to a high school prom is shameful juvenile behavior, so Stone will be memorialized here instead.

Thankfully, the adults in charge of Tartan High School had the good sense to realize that a room full of testosterone-ravaged teen boys is no place for adult film stars looking to score free press. The school said the two porn stars who accepted Stone’s Twitter invitations won’t be allowed to attend the event.

By his own father’s account, 23-year-old Florida resident Rusty Braxton is like other “typical” kids who “talk before they put their brains in gear.” But Braxton’s brainless Twitter chatter about Occupy Wall Street protesters needing to “kill a cop or 2” made him the target of a police investigation.

Braxton insisted that his tweet was misunderstood. “Never would I advocate cop killing regardless how brutal they were being,” he told The Daily Caller. “I was saying for us to have the kind [of revolution] they have overseas we’d have to do that. It was just a rebelrouser [sic] trying to cause a stink and clearly worked.”

Braxton deleted the tweet in question and later closed his Twitter account. He also made his Facebook account private after journalists discovered photos of him there brandishing weapons.

The Twitter war between Israel and Palestine turned figuratively bloody when Khulood Badawi, the Jerusalem-based national officer for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, posted a false photographic account of a Palestinian child allegedly killed by Israel.

“Palestine is bleeding,” she tweeted. “Another child killed by Israel. Another father carrying a child into a grave in Gaza.” The problem: The photo was from 2006, and the girl pictured in it died either in a car or playground accident.

Badawi later deleted the tweet and photo and apologized while also emphasizing, “This is my personal [Twitter] account.” But Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, wrote a letter demanding that Badawi be fired.

Nudity, Twitter and the National Basketball Association don’t mix well. That’s the message to J.R. Smith of the New York Knicks, who has been fined $25,000 for tweeting the photo of a woman’s bare backside.

“I didn’t know it was going to be as big a deal as it is now,” Smith said after word of the ruling. “I definitely regret it. Anytime I do anything that takes away from our team, I’m definitely going to regret it.”

Smith joins a ever-expanding roster of NBA players and one owner who have been fined for their behavior on Twitter.

One accidental tweet undermined the reputation that sports writer Tony Grossi had built during two decades of covering the Cleveland Browns. The Plain Dealer moved Grossi off the beat after he called Browns owner Randy Lerner “a pathetic figure, the most irrelevant billionaire in the world.”

Grossi objected to the newspaper’s decision to reassign him. “We’re given these marching orders to tweet your beat, to gather and attract a following, to be provocative, because it’s good for our brand to interact with the readers,” he said. “But we’re all learning the perils of this new invention.”

Update, March 8: Grossi announced via Twitter that he is leaving the Plain Dealer after more than 30 years at the paper. He’s covering the Browns again for SportsTime Ohio.