Mashable recently reported on a social media story where celebrity Justin Bieber tweeted out a user’s phone number, telling fans to “call or text” it.  The number reportedly received 26,000 texts from Beiber’s Twitter fan base of 4.5 million followers.  The 16 year old pop star’s actions were designed to get back at the user, Keven Kristopik, who had previously hacked Beiber’s phone number and sent a text message to the celebrity.

Mashable asks the question: “Celebrities suffer from invasions of privacy on a regular basis, but does that justify them in using their social media influence to turn the tables on over-enthusiastic fans or uncooperative reporters?”

Over here in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset, we actually encountered a similar case of celebrity social media misuse.  About a month ago, a local bar, Yancy’s Saloon, reportedly booted magician Brian Brushwood and his camera crew (Revision3’s Scam School).  It seems Brushwood wasn’t happy with getting kicked out of a bar, so he tweeted to his large twitter fan base (@shwood) to write bad Yelp reviews on the bar.  Within a few days, over 70 1-star reviews had surfaced on the Yancy’s Yelp page, pushing down the bar’s overall rating and in turn hurting business.

This clearly is a misuse of Yelp and Twitter.  If he had a bad experience, it makes sense that Brushwood could go on his own blog or Yelp account and write a bad review, but to turn a legion of Twitter drones against a local establishment just seems wrong (especially when none of them had actually been to the bar).

How far does it go? Although celebrities have always wielded power through their ability to make any statement newsworthy, they have never before commanded so many actual people with the push of a button.  Should Twitter monitor cases of misuse like this, or should it be more of a ‘wild-west’ environment?