Friday, August 8, 2014

You are not permitted to anger certain people, got that?

NYC DA subpoenas Twitter over parody @BicycleLobby account



Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance’s office has issued a subpoena for information about the Twitter account @BicycleLobby.n 

The anonymous, satirical account announced Friday that the company Twitter had received  a summons to appear before a grand jury against John Doe defendant in a criminal investigation.
“On Monday, Twitter alerted this account that it had received a subpoena from the office of the District Attorney of the County of New York,” the account tweeted Friday afternoon — clarifying that it was being “100%” serious about the legal notice.
The account also tweeted a copy of the subpoena online.
The Manhattan DA is asking for account information, contact information, IP addresses, email accounts, telephone numbers and all IP logs associated with the account, according to the document.
A spokesman for Twitter confirmed the authenticity of the subpoena.
"Our policy is to notify users of requests for their account information, which includes a copy of the request, prior to disclosure unless we are prohibited from doing so,” said the company, through a spokesperson.
The account — which satirizes the ‘power’ of the bicycle lobby with over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek pronouncements — recently took credit for an incident where white flags were raised on the Brooklyn Bridge by unknown vandals in place of the usual American flags placed on the bridge.
The tweet briefly fooled the New York Daily News and the Associated Press, who both reported that a pro-cycling group had taken credit for the vandalism before both quickly corrected theirarticles.
@BicycleLobby clarified on Friday that it was a parody account.
“None of the claims made here have ever been true. We did not fake the Moon landing or go for a ride with Beyoncé, for example,” it said, referring to two previous over the top tweets.
The account added that Steve Vaccaro and the law office of Vaccaro & White has been advising the owner or owners of the account and that it would decline to comment further on the matter.
The account first came to prominence after a Wall Street Journal editorial board member suggested that the New York City municipal government was in the pocket of an "all powerful” bicycle lobby.
"The bike lobby is an all-powerful enterprise," WSJ editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz said in an online video last year.
The account quickly became popular in the cycling advocacy online community as a way of poking fun at critics of cycling.
As a previous POLITICO report noted, cycling and pedestrian advocacy is quite modest.

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