Linguistic Expert: Kanye Probably Wrote Kim's Tweets

But Kim continues to insist it was her
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 9, 2016 10:29 AM CST
Linguistic Expert: Kanye Probably Wrote Kim's Tweets
Kanye West, left, and Kim Kardashian arrive at the MTV Video Music Awards at the Microsoft Theater on Sunday, Aug. 30, 2015, in Los Angeles.   (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)

Kim Kardashian threw a lot of shade on Twitter earlier this week in response to critics of her nude selfie, and if you weren't quite convinced it was actually her behind the tweets ... well, you're not alone. "Wait I can't believe people thought Kanye or Khloe hacked my Twitter. I swear I'm funny too!!!" she tweeted Tuesday in response to skeptics who wondered whether it was actually her husband or her sister bashing Bette Midler, Chloe Grace Moretz, and Piers Morgan. The New York Daily News spoke to "esteemed forensic linguist Professor Rob Leonard—who gives expert testimony about language and writing in murder trials," and after he analyzed the tweets and compared them to Kim's other tweets and her husband's tweets, his "preliminary" conclusion: It was Kanye. The evidence:

  • The tweet to Piers Morgan referenced "some ashley madison type s---." But Kim doesn't appear to use that word in any of her tweets, Leonard says, whereas Kanye not only uses it, but uses it in the same way: "essentially [to mean] 'stuff' or 'things.'"
  • The tweets all opened with "hey." West does that often—"hey @BetteMidler" is similar, for example, to West's "hey Larry Page" tweet. But Kardashian doesn't use "hey" to address individuals, she only uses the word when saying things like, "Hey guys!"
  • The hashtags were all in lowercase letters. "Kim's are always either #ALLCAPS or #CapitalizeEveryWordNoMatterWhatItIs," Leonard writes in an email, "whereas Kanye is either #ALLCAPS, or #nocaps or #Onlythefirstwordcapped." So this style matched Kanye, not Kim.
  • "Twitter" was always spelled "twitter." But Kim always uses the uppercase "T," while West is the one who always writes it with a lowercase "t." (Or in all caps.)
The tweet in which Kim denied that her husband hacked her account, Leonard notes, does appear to have been written by her. And her rep insists Kim wrote all of them. Interestingly, West tweeted Tuesday, "It’s been a lot of confusion in the past 3 weeks so let me apologize for in any way being confusing…" (More Kim Kardashian stories.)

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