Maryland state Sen William C Smith Jr went to bed on Sunday night looking forward to a busy week ahead working to reform the juvenile justice system.
When he awoke Monday morning, however, he was temporarily distracted from his more weightier concerns by the near constant notification alerts ringing from his phone.
That’s when he realised the unfortunate mistake that had been made.
The night before, Oscar-winning actor Will Smith, who shares the Maryland senator’s name, had hopped up on stage to slap Chris Rock after the comedian had made a poorly received joke about Mr Smith’s wife Jada Pinkett-Smith’s shaved head, a side effect of her alopecia diagnosis.
The responses, one user pointed out, showed the blue-check verified Maryland democrat getting “lit up” by gravely confused Twitter users who had sought out another Will Smith, one who does not have an official account on the social media site.
“Thanks, I was watching that with my friends and entire family. I threw my remote at the tv so my 5 year old daughter wouldn’t see your violent behavior,” one user tweeted at whom he thought was the recently awarded Oscar-winning Mr Smith, not the lawyer and US Army Veteran who has represented Montgomery County since 2015 Mr Smith.
“I got a few messages saying ‘you messed up,’ actually it was a little more colorful than that,” Mr Smith told the Washington Post in an interview after the week’s mishap.
In addition to the onslaught of “colourful” mentions the politician mistakenly received in the wake of the slap heard ‘round the world, for which the responsible actor has since apologised to both Mr Rock and the Academy, Mr Smith says he also accrued more than 100 new followers on the social media platform.
A typical week for him, he told the Post, usually rakes in about four or five new followers.
“You gotta laugh,” he said in the same interview, adding that he “needed some levity”.
Being in the public eye, it’s not the first time that Mr Smith has been on the receiving end of a targeted social media campaign against him. Recently, he sponsored an abortion rights bill, which led to a few hundred threats being sent to him online from far-right accounts.
He’s also not the only ‘Will Smith’ on the social media site to be caught up in the confusion following Sunday night’s eventful Oscars.
Will Smith, a podcast host who works in communications for video game developer Stray Bombay and who also holds a blue-check verified account, wrote in a tweet on Sunday: “Real talk, I’m not the person you’re upset/happy with. I make podcasts and video games for a living”.
It appears that Mr Smith, the podcast host, similar to the Maryland senator, received mentions from similarly angry – and confused – viewers of the Oscar ceremony on Sunday night.
“At the risk of making people pissed off at me instead of that other guy, the world would be a better place if we stopped answering words with violence,” he wrote on Sunday.
For the senator, he told the Post he was “horrified” after he saw the clips from the Sunday night awards show.
“I think there was a missed opportunity to address alopecia in a constructive way. And then I thought about what personal stuff someone must be going through to do something like that,” the senator told the Post, before adding, “I just hope he’s okay”.
