Ashton Kutcher's Twitter Gaffe Prompts PR Team Takeover

Ashton Kutcher's pan-Twittersphere presence has seen better days. In addition to having courted speculation about trouble in paradise with wife Demi Moore, Kutcher enraged many followers on Wednesday when he tweeted disapproval of the firing of Joe Paterno. Time to turn over the reins to people who know what they're doing, Kutcher said on his blog, to ensure his 8.2 million plus followers get more quality content, less knee jerk.

It all started when Penn State announced Wednesday that it was firing glorified head football coach Joe Paterno, 84, who failed to inform police of defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky's alleged sexual abuse of at least eight children. Kutcher's swift — and, he says, ignorant — reaction to learning the news was a tweet that read, "How do you fire Jo Pa? #insult #noclass as a hawkeye fan I find it in poor taste."

The message quickly landed Kutcher in the hot seat, as fans reacted to Kutcher's apparent insensitivity to the horrific nature of Sandusky's alleged crimes. "I quickly went back on my twitter account and found a hailstorm of responses calling me an 'idiot' and several other expletives that I've become accustom to hearing for almost anything I post," Kutcher recounts in his blog post. "I quickly retracted and deleted my previous post; however, that didn't seem enough to satisfy people’s outrage at my misinformed post. I am truly sorry."

In order to take action on his increasing inability to produce scandal-proof tweets — something he blames, perplexingly, on Twitter's evolution into a "mass publishing platform, where ones [sic] tweets quickly become news that is broadcast around the world and misinformation becomes volatile fodder for critics" — Kutcher said he is turning over the reins of @aplusk to his management team at Katalyst, which will weed out any such tweets in the future.