Okay, time for a confession.

At about this time last week, a vaguely devilish thought occurred to me. Pauline Hanson had not so long ago announced her candidacy for Beaudesert (how do ordinary Queenslanders pronounce that? Just wondering) and I thought, as you do, what we need is a fake Pauline Hanson on Twitter.

For those not Twitter-literate, there is currently something of a fad for fake public personas on Twitter. What is Twitter? Oh dear.

Thus we read the often many-times-daily 140-character musings of fake Stephen Conroy, presumably fake Gerard Henderson, fake Ann Coulter (I think), fake Andrew Bolt (tricky to tell), fake Darth Vader, The F-cking Pope (probably fake), and The Queen (might actually be real).

The user name Pauline Hanson was available, and I sent out what would be my one and only Hanson Tweet: “Elect me!”

In quick order I had eight followers. This was of course where my problems began. Each time someone follows you on Twitter (you follow other Twitterers so you can read their posts) an email is sent to the address used to register the user name. Last Friday afternoon must therefore have been a slightly confusing time in the private offices of Fairfax chairman Ron Walker, or for whoever it is that has access to the address rwalker@fairfax.com.au. It isn’t me, I’m afraid.

Anyway that was that.

Until at the weekend someone published this:

and this:

and this:

and then this:

Which just goes to show, that while I might be a deceitful charlatan, a lot of the other online media practitioners out there are lazy, credulous twits.