Banksy hijacks The Cool Hunter

An interesting thing happened today. Someone who we can only presume as Banksy (although no proof has been given) seemed to have hijacked The Cool Hunter’s twitter feed. I didn’t notice at first, until I saw some tweets come up from ‘BANKSYartist’ and realised that I don’t remember seeing Banksy tweet before, or even remember following him. On closer inspection, it seemed he had taken over The Cool Hunter’s feed:

And so www.twitter.com/thecoolhunter became www.twitter.com/banksyartist and the original thecoolhunter feed became blank saying something like ‘Can someone from the cool hunter get in touch’ – but I didn’t take a screenshot and now it’s gone…

The only way I think this can be done is if ‘someone’ hacked into The Cool Hunter’s account, changed the @name to BANKSYartist – then that meant @thecoolhunter became free, so they created a new account under that name quickly. Effectivly meaning no-one else can steal it. Which is what intrigued me; because why bother doing that? Unless they wanted to safeguard it against falling into the wrong hands…

So is it an actual hijack (by Banksy? Or just someone dicking around? Banksy.co.uk says ‘Banksy cannot be found on facebook/twitter/myspace etc’), or is this some kind of strange PR hoax. Or indeed a collaboration between The Cool Hunter and Banksy.

One thing’s for sure; it’s gone largely unnoticed. A few people retweeted it, including myself, but I thought it’d end up trending or at least lots of people commenting on it. Even google doesn’t have much to say on it at the moment. So… does this prove that it’s a PR stunt gone wrong? Or is this Banksy trying to say that The Cool Hunter doesn’t have much influence at all? In fact, is it a commentary on people’s current obsession with trends, what’s now/next, etc, and that really, none of it matters a jot? I hope it’s the latter. And I do hope it’s actual Banksy. We’ll have to see….