Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Lady Gaga and Alicia Keys Go on Twitter Strike for AIDS

With so many celebrities already on hunger strike to keep the pounds off, big names like Lady Gaga and Alicia Keys are turning to a different form of withholding to make a point: social media.

Keys has organized a group of famous people to sign off of Facebook and Twitter on Tuesday for World AIDS Day. They have agreed not to tweet or status-update again until $1 million is raised for Keys’ Keep a Child Alive charity.

Participants have prepared their “last tweet and testament” and will appear in coffins representing their “digital deaths” for videos and ads to promote the cause.

Jennifer Hudson, Ryan Seacrest, Kim and Khloe Kardashian, Elijah Wood, Serena Williams, Janelle Monae and Swizz Beatz are signed up to sign off of Twitter and Facebook.

Keys (who has 2.6 million Twitter followers and 7.8 million people who like her on Facebook) told the Associated Press, “This is such a direct and instantly emotional way and a little sarcastic, you know, of a way to get people to pay attention.”

Keep a Child Alive co-founder Leigh Blake added, “I have a feeling that Gaga is going to raise it all by herself.” (Gaga has 7.2 million Twitter followers and 23.9 million people who like her on Facebook.)

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald