Yesterday, a Twitter user took advantage of Kevin Ware's horrifying injury in the Louisville-Duke March Madness game to make a fake Kevin Ware account.
As of yesterday evening, the account had only tweeted five times: once thanking people for their support and rooting for Louisville, and four times responding to prominent Twitter users who had tweeted about Ware. (Ware's real account appears to be @_Woody23; it hasn't tweeted since January 2012.)
Since then, though, whoever thought this was a good idea has only gone farther with it.
The tweets started mostly as schlocky attempts at inspiration
but quickly spun off in more disturbing directions. Here, whoever's running the account tries to call out another fake Ware Twitter.
The account has also been trying to spread itself with pleas for retweets, mostly centered around the idea that someone could come with Ware to the Final Four.
There have been peculiar religious messages
and a particularly bizarre spate of tweets making terrible puns off the word "leg." (Not sure how anyone could possibly think this was a guy who is actually in the hospital with a broken leg.)
There have been real Kevin Ware photos co-opted by the account
and attempts to stay timely, which is a common trope of parody accounts.
The weirdest thing about it is that, as of now, there doesn't seem to be an objective beyond just gaining followers — the sincerity of many of the tweets makes it seem like just a weird plea for attention.
It also interacted with former Major League Baseball player Chipper Jones, who was fooled into thinking it was the real Kevin Ware.
It's pretty grotesque to imagine a real human sending out these tweets.
Now there's also a Facebook page, which is linked to in the Twitter's bio. It features polls about the Final Four and other pointless, confusing stuff.
The account has resumed tweeting this morning much the same as it left off: "For every dark night, there's a brighter day" being an impressively dumb highlight. Although @KevinWare_5 remains live, it is in clear violation of Twitter's Terms of Service, which forbids accounts from pretending to be real people without acknowledging themselves as parody.
UPDATE: @KevinWare_5 has been banned, as of 12:15 pm or so EST. Count one for decency.
UPDATE 2: Here's another fake Ware account, @5KevinWare. Basically all it does is thank people, but it has 30,000 followers.
