Ashton Kutcher announced he was going to hand over the management of his Twitter feed to his company Katalyst Media on Thursday, November 10, following a stream of criticism on the social networking site after he wrote a Tweet defending Penn State football coach Joe Paterno when news broke that Paterno had been fired."How do you fire Jo Pa? #insult #noclass as a hawkeye fan I find it in poor taste," Kutcher Tweeted to his 8.2 million followers but later deleted.
The Penn State coach is currently embroiled in a child sex abuse scandal after the team's former defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, was accused of sexually assaulting eight boys over a 15-year period. One of those alleged assaults occurred on the Penn State campus and was witnessed by the assistant coach Mike McQueary, who was a graduate assistant at the time. McQueary reported the incident to Paterno. Paterno then went to the school's athletic director instead of going to police.
After deleting the Tweet, Kutcher apologized for his mistake. "As an advocate in the fight against child sexual exploitation, I could not be more remorseful for all involved in the Penn St. case," he wrote.
Kutcher and wife Demi Moore began a public service announcement campaign in April against human trafficking and child prostitution. "Real Men Don't Buy Girls" PSAs feature celebrities like Sean Penn, Justin Timberlake, Drake, Jason Mraz and Bradley Cooper doing "manly things" like making a grilled cheese sandwich with an iron and fighting a robot.
The campaign faced controversy in July when the Village Voice published a story which criticized the campaign and the statistics and facts Kutcher cited in media interviews.
"As of immediately I will stop tweeting until I find a way to properly manage this feed. I feel awful about this error. Won't happen again," he later added on Wednesday.
On Thursday, Kutcher announced on his blog that he was handing over the management of his Twitter feed to his company Katalyst Media.
"Up until today I have posted virtually every one of my tweets on my own, but clearly the platform has become to [sic] big to be managed by a single individual," Kutcher wrote. "It seems that today that twitter has grown into a mass publishing platform, where ones tweets quickly become news that is broadcasted around the world and misinformation becomes volatile fodder for critics."
He writes that his initial Tweet about Paterno's firing came from a quick view of an ESPN report on television. He later heard more about the story and went back to his Twitter account to correct himself but faced a firestorm of Tweets criticizing him for his lack of knowledge about the Paterno situation.
"I quickly retracted and deleted my previous post, however that didn't seem enough to satisfy people's outrage at my misinformed post. I truly am sorry if I offended anyone and more over am going to take action to ensure that it doesn't happen again," Kutcher said. "While I will continue to express myself through @Aplusk I'm going to turn the management of the feed over to my team at Katalyst Media to ensure the quality of it's content."
The actor apologized once again stating, "My sincere apologies to anyone who I have offended. It was a mistake that I don't think will happen again."
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