Ashton Kutcher Posted His Phone Number On Twitter Claiming To Miss “Real Connection”
Ashton Kutcher would like to talk to you. And you, and you, and you, not you, and you! He recently posted his “personal” phone number on Twitter and asked the general public to reach out to him. He wants to have “a real connection” and I guess if that means receiving pictures of your dog’s vagina, so be it. Unfortunately, the number’s gone now. While Aston did interact personally with a number of fans, he deleted his post and blamed fragile “sms” servers for his retraction. But was Ashton really just a lonely soul, shivering away in our cold, impersonal digital landscape? Anyone who believed that must have missed his previous post where he announced he was changing his “social media strategy”. According to Wired, his heartfelt plea for connection was nothing more than a phishing scam. Somewhere Justin Timberlake’s crying his eyes out again.
Ashton’s foray into public relations started with this tweet.
Changing my social media strategy starting tomorrow. Stay tuned.
— ashton kutcher (@aplusk) January 29, 2019
A couple of days later he posted the following message accompanied by a phone number, and a GIF of him on a stage captioned “you are the fabric of who we are, and we love you!” (via People).
“I miss having a real connection w/ real people. My Community.From now on you can just text me. I won’t be able to respond to everyone but at least we can be real w/ each other & I can share the unedited latest & greatest in my world. 555-SUCK IT STEVE JOBS. Yes this is my# in case anyone had doubts.
Ok, I may have doctored the number in that quote, but the rest is 100% accurate. People who texted the number received an auto-reply asking them to click a link to be added to “his phone”.
I’m shook pic.twitter.com/BZiLkMLTbG
— Seabass? (@SebastianG_25) January 29, 2019
Here’s where things get shady. According to Wired, the link directs to a company called Community and the user is required to provide their name, birthday, city, etc, before Ashton can reply.
The Terms of Service more helpfully reveal that Community “provides its clients (including influencers, musicians, athletes, brands, actors, their agents, and others, collectively, ‘Clients’) the ability through a non-exclusive, revocable license to send and receive text messages from users of the Service by using a ten-digit phone number provided by COMMUNITY (the ‘COMMUNITY Phone Number’).”
The TOS also told me, “You understand and acknowledge that conversations using the Service are not private conversations with Clients but are intended as messages sent and interactions solely for purposes of promoting and/or advertising the Client and the Client’s products and service.”
So much for an honest, human connection. Was it all a scam? Maybe somebody can ask him when he posts his number again.
I will repost soon… sms is a fragile beast
— ashton kutcher (@aplusk) January 30, 2019
I say screw texting with Ashton! He seems really boring anyway. I’d rather make an emotional connection with Otto, the Brooklyn feral cat.
Pic: Wenn.com