Travis Tuthill, a restaurant worker in New Jersey, became the target of hockey Twitter expressing displeasure with Tom Wilson Monday night. It wasn’t because he tweeted something outrageous regarding Wilson, because let’s face it everyone was doing that, but because some interpreted his bio to read that he ran the Washington Capitals’ official Twitter account, @Capitals.
Tuthill’s bio reads “Capitals/Nationals/Football Team/Wizards | June 7th, 2018 The Capitals are finally Stanley Cup Champions | follow my other accounts @averagecapsfan @capitals.”
“It’s kind of been a running joke so to speak about the account I run and all the different accounts,” Tuthill said. “A lot of people assume I run accounts that I actually don’t run, and I’ve interacted with some accounts — we’ve basically come up with me pretending I’m different accounts because people, for whatever reason, believe I am part of those different accounts even though I’m not.”
After the Caps deleted their tweet about Tom Wilson after the game, Tuthill tweeted it himself to his 1,600 followers because he liked it so much.
https://twitter.com/tuthill_travis/status/1389404244013457409?s=20
But the joke in his bio was taken literally by people unfamiliar with him. Most notably by Rachel Doerrie who previously worked in the Player Information/Video department with the New Jersey Devils and is now part of the Staff and Graph podcast. She sent the now deleted tweet to her more than 12,000 followers.
And soon Tuthill’s mentions were full of people mistaking him for running the official account.
“It just kind of exploded and when she said that everybody else from other fan bases associate me with the account now and it just it blew up more quickly than I could have thought like from within the next five or 10 minutes after she posted that like everybody came after me and it was like it was really crazy.”
From the time of Doerrie to when Tuthill checked Tuesday morning, “at least close to 1000” mentions.
https://twitter.com/tuthill_travis/status/1389662472672583691?s=20
“It was crazy in the fact that I couldn’t believe something like that could have taken off that quickly. And it also kind of you know, I kind of got a lot of insults and a lot of threats so that was crazy part of it,” Tuthill said. “I didn’t expect people to react that way to me for whatever reason. That’s that was something that kind of took me by surprise is the amount of threats that I got.
“A lot of you know fans from other teams, calling me out and taking my profile picture and, calling me names calling me ugly, calling me homophobic slurs, sending me threats. It was a lot of that type of stuff.”
The people who started the joke about him running the account quickly sprung into action. They turned the idea of him running the official Caps account, and other Caps meme accounts into a meme itself.
— UNSUSPENDED (@BuraGONEsky65) May 4, 2021
— ℹ️🅰️N (@CAPS_NAT1ON) May 4, 2021
“Once they saw all these people, associating me with the Caps account, they kind of took it all took it as their chance to make it a meme within the Caps, Twitter realm,” Tuthill said. “Saying like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m also Travis. I run this account too. Haha, look at me.’ It just kind of blew up that way.”
