Dan Warne17 March 2009, 3:02 PM
The hilarious and prescient Fake Stephen Conroy account on Twitter has been abruptly closed, after it was revealed that the spoofer was a senior Telstra employee.
The Twitter feed impersonating the Rudd government's controversial pro-censorship communication minister Senator Stephen Conroy had become very popular among Australian twitterers.
The man behind it was Leslie Nassar, a former producer of podcasts for the ABC, who is now employed as a "senior emerging technology specialist (mobile)" with Telstra.
Nassar closed the @StephenConroy Twitter account 20 minutes ago, after he outed himself on a blog post yesterday afternoon.
He is still running a blog called DepartmentOfInternets.com on which he yesterday also published a scathing review of the ABC's new iPhone app and mobile website.
The deletion of the StephenConroy account does not appear to be due to pressure from Conroy's office -- the Minister acknowledged the Twitter feed as "healthy satire" just a few days ago.
APC's enquiry on why Nassar had pulled the feed were met with the response: "It is *crazy* in Leslie-town at the moment. If you're a member of the press, you know why, so your best bet is to contact the Telstra PR folks."
Telstra PR did not immediately respond to APC's enquiries. (We assume that Telstra didn't tell Nassar to pull the feed for fear of offending the minister though, as Telstra management is clearly not afraid to do that.)
You can see some of Fake Stephen Conroy's last Twitters in Google Cache.
Above: Leslie Nassar when he was working for the ABC. (Photo credit: Nick Hodge)