The Funny, Sad Story of How Wendi Deng-Murdoch Got Impersonated on Twitter

All Things D has solved the mystery of how parody Twitter account @Wendi_Deng was incorrectly marked "verified" this weekend, apparently against the parodist's will.

Turns out the ferocious, pie-thwarting wife of Rupert briefly had a @WendiDeng Twitter account, without an underscore . In the process of "verifying" Rupert's account over New Year's weekend, Twitter offered to verify Wendi "as a courtesy." But then, miscommunication struck:

Since the information exchange was done over a hurried holiday weekend, several sources on both sides said there was a miscommunication and the company mangled the @ address it was told by Deng's assistant. Mistakenly, Twitter apparently thought that the correct account was the one with the underscore and not the one with no space at all.


Wendi has since suspended real account @WendiDeng, but based on All Things D's screengrab, I see why Twitter messed up: Real Wendi's tweets were so half-hearted and incomplete that they look like machine-generated spam. At least fake Wendi reads like the creation of a real human. So real, in fact, that when fake Wendi tweeted, "@rupertmurdoch RUPERT!!! delete tweet!" a cowed Rupert apparently obeyed. In other words: Wendi Deng failed the Turing test, but she has Rupert on such a tight leash that he'll take commands from any bot that even vaguely resembles her, anyway.

And that is the story of how one of the most fiercely ambitious women on the planet—who started social-climbing her way out of rural China at the age of 19, scrambling from one rich husband to another until she landed, finally, at the head of one of the richest, most powerful families in Western civilization—briefly lost control, causing her billionaire husband to take commands from a random British comedian on Twitter. [All Things D, Read Write Web, image via Getty]