After 71-year-old vice president Dick Cheney received a heart transplant Saturday, his old cardiac-arrest-ridden heart was in all likelihood, destroyed.
A similar fate befell a Twitter account parodying Cheney’s old heart, @CheneysOldHeart, when it was suspended sometime Sunday because of aggressive following techniques.
But unlike Cheney’s old heart, the parody account has been revived: Its creator, 29-year-old meteorologist Monica Traphagan from Salt Lake City, contested the suspension.
“I was confused and kind of annoyed because initially it wasn’t clear why I’d been suspended,” Traphagan told the Daily Dot. “When I saw why, it made more sense because I was following a lot of people very quickly.”
Twitter has strict rules people must follow when creating parody and novelty accounts. The most regularly broken rule is that a parody account must identify itself as a parody in its profile and must have words like “not,” “fake,” or “fan” in its name. This is the same rule one popular account parodying French President Nicolas Sarkozy broke more than a month ago.
Since Traphagan followed these rules, and did not use an automation program to follow people, she was pleased to see the account reinstated since it was created in good fun, she said.
“I first saw the news of the heart transplant on Twitter, actually. When reading the news, I got the idea of a war between Cheney’s old black heart and his hippie-dippie new heart. I first tried to register @CheneysNewHeart, but saw that it was already taken so I decided to create the black heart and have it harass the other account. There’s this whole stereotype about the menacing Dick Cheney that’s easy to exploit for satire.”
Traphagan isn’t sure how long the account will last, considering news of Cheney’s transplant is more the five days old. But that hasn’t stopped her from using the account to make fun of the aging politician.
“Oh, @CheneysNewHeart, you thought it would be THAT EASY to get rid of me? Well I’M BBAAAACCCCCCCCCCKKKKK!!!” she tweeted. “It was a lonely couple of days without Twitter, but it allowed the evil inside me to grow further. But now you know: I WILL NOT BE SILENCED!”
Photo via @cheneysoldheart
