Millions have flocked to Twitter the last 24 hours to express their opinions and reactions to Will Smith slapping Chris Rock during the Academy Awards on Sunday night, with many tagging what they believed to be Smith's Twitter handle to make sure their messages crossed the actor's path.
There's just one problem, however.
Will Smith, who won Best Actor on Sunday for his performance in
"King Richard," is not on Twitter.
Will Smith, a San Francisco-based video game publicist, podcaster and former tech journalist, is on Twitter. He has owned the Twitter handle "@willsmith" for more than 15 years, and been bombarded with tweets mistaking him for the 53-year-old actor, rapper and producer for much of the last day.
A quick Twitter search of his handle shows hundreds, if not thousands, of users flooding the lesser-known Smith's mentions. Just a sampling of the reaction can be seen below.
Even ubiquitous ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith, in front of his 5.6 million Twitter followers, condemned the actor’s actions in multiple tweets. But he, like so many others online, tagged a different Will Smith.
In Stephen A. Smith's sixth of seven tweets about the incident, he finally stopped tagging the wrong Will Smith.
As a result of the case of mistaken identity, Smith’s Twitter following has grown from around 136,000 two weeks ago to more than 233,000, and counting, as of this article’s publication.
In reaction to his unplanned social media explosion, the San Francisco-based Smith simply tweeted "Whelp" before threading additional thoughts on the situation.
Smith has been on Twitter almost since its inception, joining in January, 2007 and holding onto the @willsmith handle ever since. He hosts two tech podcasts with more than 3,000 subscribers and works in communications for the video game company Stray Bombay. He is also the former editor-in-chief of the magazine Maximum PC, as well as the founder of Tested.com.
Will Smith, the actor without a Twitter account, posted an apology on Instagram on Monday afternoon. The former "Fresh Prince" said Rock's joke about wife Jada Pinkett-Smith's alopecia was "too much for me to bear."
"I was out of line and I was wrong," he wrote on Instagram. "I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be."
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