Back when your friendly Vulture editors were but wee precocious youngsters, standing barely knee-high to a grasshopper, nary a day went by when our mother didn’t remind us that “If you don’t have anything nice to tweet, don’t tweet anything at all.†We took that saying to heart, which is one of the ways that we managed to work our way into our current position of such tremendous authority! Unfortunately, though, best-selling author Alice Hoffman either was not taught or failed to learn the same lesson, as she used the popular microblogging service to go absolutely ballistic on a Boston Globe critic named Roberta Silman who gave her new novel a less-than-stellar review. How ballistic, exactly? Well, she fired off 27 tweets (!) about the bad review, one of which included the reviewer’s e-mail address and telephone number! Then she nuked her entire Twitter account, probably hoping that said tweets would just quietly disappear into the ether. Well, they didn’t.
Look Who’s Snarking Now: Novelist Uses Twitter to Trash Critic [Gawker]