Twitter for newborns: Weird and creepy or fun and humourous?

YOU’D think that digital narcissism begins and ends with the self, and of course it mostly does, until you realise that the average narcissist would consider their baby an extension of self.

Which might explain baby Twitter accounts. As in, opening a Twitter account in the name of your baby and then tweeting as though you are that baby. Example: “Join me in my crib. Party 3am”. Or “Parties in my crib are always BYOB”.

While not quite Swiftian in their satire, the owner of this account — an adult female, who, for the sake of kindness, shall remain anonymous — explained on the Baby Centre blog her moment of inspiration for her infant son’s pretend tweets: “Not all parents will understand, but they will get why you might be up at 3am for a reason other than partying. I was mind-numbingly bored when the passing thought occurred to me, ‘Tweeting as my baby would be hilarious’. After posting the first tweet about the 3am crib party, the woman says she “laughed hysterically (let’s not forget it really was 3am and I was hysterical with exhaustion”.

Bit of a twee one trick pony, though, tweeting as your baby. It’s not like babies have externally interesting lives (although who knows what it’s like inside their heads). Your average real baby doesn’t get up to much other than sleeping, feeding, pooing, crying, and sleeping, on repeat.

Yet despite this frankly unglamorous lifestyle, several misguided parents in the public eye have thought to thrust their babies into said eye via Twitter: both actor Tori Spelling’s baby son and American TV star Melissa Joan Hart’s baby son have their own Twitter accounts, run by mommy, as does the offspring of 16 & Pregnant person Maci Bookout.

It’s not just vaguely public figures who are doing this — according to US website GoDaddy.com, more and more parents are registering Twitter names for their newborns, as well as email and Tumblr accounts and domain names. Basically, you give birth not just to your baby, but to @LittleJohnny, and littlejohnny.com. All before Little Johnny has even figured out how to sit up unaided.

The New York Times recently reported that before Little Johnny is even born, googling baby names is the first step parents take in creating their baby’s online identity, making sure that they are not inadvertently giving him or her a name popular with strippers or drug dealers. Yet they want their kid’s name to be unusual enough so that in years to come it will feature at the top end of a google search, rather than lost amongst the ordinary Johnnys.

Nor is this digital baby identity anything new — since 2008, parents have been creating profiles for their kids on Totspot and Kidmondo, the kid social network equivalents of Facebook. Never mind the American government spying on your every online move — that’s the least of your worries when your own parents are setting you up in digital public before you even have the basic motor skills to type your own name. Thanks, Mom.

But back to Twitter. A 24-year-old blogger, presumably not a parent, called Emma Gannon wrote recently in the Telegraph that she thought Twitter accounts for babies were “sinister”, “creepy” and “weird,” and an invasion of the child’s future privacy. The online forum Netmums — not to be confused with Mumsnet — went one further, with all kinds of unpleasant comments about tweeting as your baby. “pathetic”, “self indulgent”, “stupid”, “sad”, declared anonymous online commentators, with one fascist suggesting Twitter baby accounts were “a reason people should be made to take intelligence tests before being allowed to breed”.

Which seems a bit, well, Nazi, to be honest. It’s only Twitter. And anyway, according to Baby Centre Blog data, mothers use social networking 15% more than the rest of the population, which makes sense when you think how long it takes to leave the house with a small child. Far easier to stay indoors on your iPad and your digital ‘friends’ — although longterm this may lead to depression and agoraphobia, but that’s not the issue here.

The real problem with Twitter accounts for your baby isn’t invasion of infant privacy or narcissistic self indulgence of bored mummies, but something far simpler — they are just not that funny. There are only so many variations on poo/ babysick/sleep deprivation jokes you can keep rearranging in 140 characters, and even then, the only other person who will find them amusing is the baby’s other parent. Not the rest of us. Sorry.

No, far funnier are the baby spoof accounts. Twitter lends itself to parody like no other online medium. Check out the account of Moses Paltrow Martin @MosesPaltrow, who tweets stuff like “This morning my mom was like finish your kale smoothie & I was like why don’t you go on another silent retreat?” and “Take my word for it, a $1,200 sippy cup doesn’t make beet juice taste any better.”

The former foetus of Beyonce and JayZ — now a toddler called Blue Ivy — was formerly on Twitter as @BeyonceJayFetus, tweeting things like, “Yep it’s true I’m a girl, I just bejeweled by umbilical cord” and “There better be a fresh pair of Timbs or Louboutins on the other side waiting for me”. The spoof account of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s unfortunately named baby North West already has 15,765 followers, (“already more famous than u”) despite following nobody and tweeting only 7 times, 4 of which seem to be spam.

As you can imagine, the British royal baby, as yet unborn at time of writing, has provided an endless source of Twitter fun with handles like @IamRoyalBaby (“third in line to the throne, indistinguishable genitalia, and for the last time, I don’t know my name yet”) and @RoyalFoetus (“One is done with gestating”, “Update: kicking off”). Obviously, there are spoof Queen accounts too (@GinO’Clock), and spoof Prince Charles accounts urging the royal grandchild to appear: “Hurry up royal baby, the world’s media are running out of stories.”

But when the news of the actual royal baby was announced last winter, Twitter almost melted when 1,000 tweets per second were generated by the hashtag #royalbaby — from very sincere people offering very sincere congratulations, from Boris Becker to David Cameron. The spoofs came quickly after.

So parents, when it comes to Twitter accounts for your actual offspring, best to proceed with caution. Remember when people would show you their three thousand photos of their infant darling in three thousand identical poses, and you would have to feign fascination, masking yawns with wide-stretched eyes? Twitter is no different. Don’t do it.