The Republican National Committee (RNC) reportedly linked to a porn account by accident for months instead of using the correct Twitter handle for the Maryland Republican Party.
The RNC’s official website, GOP.com, previously listed the state’s Twitter account as @mdreps — an account that regularly tweets out porn links and is linked to the website sexycarbabes.com, The Capital Gazette reported on Monday.
The GOP website appears to have been corrected after the RNC was notified of the error and the story was published.
{mosads}Maryland Republican officials told the newspaper that they had changed its Twitter handle to @mdgop in January without telling national officials.
“We did not (tell them). We updated it on our website and all our entities then though,” said Patrick O’Keefe, executive director of the Maryland Republican Party. “Not notifying the RNC back in February was just an oversight.”
The risqué account featuring naked women took over the handle at the end of that month, according to the newspaper.
Twitter reportedly transferred the tweets from @mdreps to @mdgop and offered to freeze the first account so the name was not up for grabs by other users.
O’Keefe told Twitter in an email obtained by the outlet that he wanted to take them up on their offer but the @mdreps handle was never frozen, the Gazette reported.
Twitter did not respond to the newspaper’s request for comment.
Users continued to tweet at or mention the discontinued account, even after it was transferred to Sexy Car Babes.
Maryland Republican Party Chairman Dirk Haire, however, told the newspaper that he wasn’t concerned.
“Like virtually all Americans, I don’t go on Twitter,” Haire said, adding that Twitter was for members of the media and athletes. “We use Facebook much more than Twitter.”