Did she or didn't she? That's the question people are asking about Queen Elizabeth of England today following an official ceremony in which she apparently sent out her first-ever royal tweet on Twitter, immediately trending on the social media as a result.
The royal family has recently been embracing Twitter, and now the queen has apparently signed on as well. Earlier this year Prince Harry started using the social media website, and even tweeted a selfie. And just last month, the royal family announced the pregnancy of Prince Williams's wife Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, via Twitter. The queen has been known to embrace new technology during her long tenure, having sent the first-ever email by a monarch way back in 1976, and uploading a You Tube video in 2008. After photobombing a selfie, which was subsequently uploaded to Twitter earlier this year, it seemed Queen Elizabeth was finally ready to tweet on her own - but was she?
The queen, with much fanfare, removed her royal glove at the opening of an exhibition at London's Science Museum attended by hundreds of guests, and tapped a tablet which was said to have immediately sent the following message to the twittersphere using the account @BritishMonarchy: "It is a pleasure to open the Information Age exhibition today at the @sciencemuseum and I hope people will enjoy visiting. Elizabeth R." The "R" is short for Regina, which means queen in Latin, and is typically how the Queen informally signs her name. A large screen behind her displayed her message to the approval of the crowd.
Within five hours the tweet was retweeted over 18,000 times, but controversy soon ensued. The Tweetdeck application, which can determine the device from which a tweet has been sent, clearly shows the tweet was sent directly from an iPhone, not an iPad or other tablet device. While a Buckingham Palace spokesperson had made it clear that Elizabeth had not actually typed the tweet herself, stating, "The Queen approved the text and then subsequently sent it," the palace was cagier on whether she actually sent the tweet, explaining that "We're not going to get into the processology of this."
Besides the fact that processology is not a real word, it seems as if the palace may have been caught red-handed in manufacturing the supposed tweeting by the queen. Get ready for #tweetgate!
