New Trend Falsely Claimed: Debt Collection and Twitter

When Rebecca Eckler began trying to get her publisher, Key Porter books, to cough up the $9,000 it owed her for her (not very good^*) book about being a mom, I’m sure she wasn’t trying to rile up the collections industry.

However, throw in a misleading headline and lede (“lede” is fancy journalism talk for “opening paragraph”) by the Winnipeg Free Press (you get what you pay for, I guess), though, and you end up with several things to get riled up about.

Chief among them: characterizing what Eckler is doing as “debt collection” via social media — something that, as we all remember from the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, is currently not allowed.

insideARM.com managing editor Michael Klozotsky takes a deeper look at this over on our Forbes blog. You can read more about it over there.

^* “I rarely spend an entire day and night alone with The Dictator,” Eckler has written. “The Dictator” is her affectionate term for her own child, raised by nannies while Eckler does…something else. We can strike “improve her writing” off the list because: she hasn’t. The fact that she’s writing about parenting at all seems to make as much sense as that time Jessica Simpson wrote that book about weddings after being married for approximately 15 seconds. But I digress.