Twitter shutters Stier’s FDA spoof

It was funny because it was too close to being true. Twitter suspended a spoof account of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Tobacco Products after the account mocked the FDA’s e-cigarette policy.

Jeff Stier, senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) and one of the nation’s leading critics of the FDA’s e-cigarette crackdown, set up the account to mock the agency’s monotonous Twitter feed.

“I set up a spoof twitter account- clearly identified as such- called FDATobaccoBot to parody the FDA’s absurd bot-like twitter account,” Stier told The Daily Caller News Foundation via email. “To avoid any confusion, I explained in the account’s bio: This is the #FDA Tobacco Bot Spoof Account. Send me questions about your tobacco #Ecig products,” Stier added.

“The account is obviously a spoof,” said NCPPR. “But it is also incisive political parody. For instance, when someone asked the spoof account about the Royal College of Physicians report that recommends doctors widely publicize e-cigarettes to their smoking patients, the spoof account responded: “RCP #Ecig report irrelevant rubbish to U.S. policy-making: English English differs from U.S. English significantly.”

No reason was stated in the story as to why Twitter shuttered the parody account.