Celebrities abandon Twitter for a good cause

Do not be alarmed if you cannot find your daily dose of high-flying celebrity on World Aids Day, the 1st of December. There is nothing wrong with your Twitter feed, and your Tweetdeck is working fine. But celebrities like Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake and Alicia Keys are abandoning Twitter until US$1-million has been raised for the charity Keep A Child Alive.

According to PCMag.com, the celebrities will post tongue-in-cheek “last tweet and testament” videos in which they’ll be lying in a coffin, to depict their “digital deaths.”

The campaign is the brainchild of soul singer Keys, who is the global ambassador for Keep A Child Alive, the charity that “provides first class AIDS care through doctors, nutrition, testing, transportation, and treatment for opportunistic infections, which are all necessary for anti-retroviral treatment to be successful.”

Celebrities are increasingly using Twitter as a platform from which to use their status to do charity work. TwitChange, a fundraiser to raise money for a nonprofit group that helps children in Haiti, raised thousands of dollars by auctioning over 150 celebrities. Through eBay auctions, people could bid to be retweeted, mentioned, or followed by their favorite celebrity.

Other celebrity participants include Jennifer Hudson, Serena Williams, Elijah Wood, Ryan Seacrest, and Kim and Khloe Kardashian. Many of these figures have huge followings on these sites, and the cumulative effect of all of this celebrity going silent is likely to have a measurable effect on Twitter. Lady Gaga alone has more than 7.2-million followers on Twitter as well as about 24 million Facebook fans, while Keys has around 2.6 million Twitter followers.

If you wish to make a donation and get the celebrities tweeting again, then check out the various payment options available from Keep A Child Alive.