A WORLD WITHOUT TWEETS!

This story was swiped from popbitch.com's great, bitter newsletter. (You can subscribe to it by entering your email at POPBITCH.COM.) I don't usually reprint entire articles but the newsletter version has more juicy details than the link on their site. Also in this issue: hating Willow Smith, who has just gone #1 in the UK.

Celebrities' social suicide

Neatly proving just how ineffective social media actually is, 18 celebrities (and Jay Sean) sacrificed their "digital lives" for charity last week, vowing to stop updating their Twitter and Facebook feeds. Social network silence from Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys, Justin Timberlake and others until their fans donated a million dollars to the Keep A Child Alive campaign to help fight AIDS. With six days gone, donations were still under $300k. The celebs got restive - Usher just plain gave up and started tweeting - so a billionaire patsy, and longtime AIDS funder Stewart Bahr, was drafted in to pay it off.

It would have cost the celebs' 35 million combined followers less than 3 cents each to buy back their lives and get them tweeting again, so it appears their fans are staunchly pro-AIDS, or no-one really cared very much about what they had to say in the first place.

FYI Serena Williams inadvertently summed up the campaign's biggest problem in her last tweet and testament: "[It means] no more news about me winning more Grand Slams, selling books, winning gold medals, owning AMAZING football teams or pioneering fashion until we raise some serious cash". Is it any wonder people wanted her silenced?