How to Lose Twitter Followers and Alienate People

In what is sure to become a Lifetime Original movie, celebrity blogger Perez Hilton is going for the Guinness World Record in most friend breakups on a social network. Our movie fades into a scene where reports of Michael Jackson being rushed to the hospital surface on the news, and then we flash to an eager blogger rushing to his computer to proclaim it all part of a publicity stunt or severe case of cold feet.

We'll then get a long, drawn-out monotague put to the soothing sounds of Beat It showing hundreds, thousands, and even hundreds of thousands clicking that unfollow button on Twitter.

According to Zap 2 News & Buzz, that number has reached 800,000 Michael Jackson fans who have stopped following Hilton's tweets.

Now, I have to admit, I'm not really hooked into this Hollywood thing. I love movies, and I have my favorite shows, but if you'd asked me a month ago who Perez Hilton was, I'd probably mumble something about him being Paris Hilton's cousin or something similar. What can I say? I don't watch reality television and most of my Hollywood "gossip" comes from reading the covers of celebtrity magazines while waiting in line at the store.

I do admit that every once in a while I'm sucked in to clicking on a Yahoo! OMG photo gallery, though most of the time I come away thinking that OMG's writing is the main reason why Yahoo has tanked over the last few years. I know if I'm a Yahoo stockholder, I might sell when I see them making fun of Jessica Simpson for actually looking healthy for a change. But that's just me.

One thing I do applaud are the Michael Jackson fans who have clicked that unfollow button. Not that I have anything against Perez Hilton, or think one thing or the other of him, but it's good to see people putting their social networking where their mouths are. It's so easy to say you are taking a moral or ethical stance against something, but it's too few times that people actually do it.