Mat Honan, for Gizmodo:

Bullshit, Ashton. You weren’t “spreading gossip or rumors” through your Twitter feed. There was no “misinformation.” You were voicing an opinion that turned out to be unpopular. Now, you may have been ill-informed about why Paterno was out, but you weren’t spreading misinformation. He really was gone. You just said something stupid and got shit all over in response. And so now you want to take your ball and go home? It’s an easy and cowardly thing to do.

This goes back to a couple of items Jim and I have posted this week about appropriate behavior for journalists on Twitter. TV show celebrity Ashton Kutcher’s evasive language belies his behavior, and Honan has rightly called him on it.

If you’re going to use a social network to push your agenda or to entertain an audience, have enough sense to know when you’re going to piss people off. Have the stones to stick by your comments, even if you have to apologize later.

By farming out his Twitter account to a PR team, Kutcher is basically throwing in the towel and making a conscious decision to use Twitter as a marketing vehicle, nothing more. I hope his subscribers enjoy their homogenized, pasteurized, sanitized pablum.