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The wrong Evan Solomon goes viral, creates ‘accidental Canadian celebrity’

When the CBC’s Evan Solomon was fired Tuesday night in the wake of a Toronto Star investigation about the host’s involvement in an art dealing business, the story went viral.

Everyone in Ottawa was talking about it.

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Only… this was the wrong Evan Solomon.

Rather than tweeting out the CBC host’s Twitter handle, @evansolomoncbc, users were accidentally tweeting @evansolomon, a tech industry professional in San Francisco.

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He seemed to take his accidental celebrity in stride.

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Solomon (the U.S. one) says it’s not the first time the issue has come up. In 2011, when Canada was in the midst of an election, he said the volume started “heating up.”

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“Today I tried to find a peaceful resolution, but it was to no avail. Instead I just decided to start impersonating the Canadian me,” he wrote.

https://twitter.com/kellypatrickxox/status/52501860858335232

“Most of the time it’s hilarious. On days when it gets really popular the notifications are pretty annoying,” he told Global News via Twitter on Wednesday.

“I disabled Twitter notifications on my phone yesterday afternoon because it was just going off nonstop.”

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As far as the recent controversy goes, “I’m mostly confused why he’s not allowed to sell art in the first place,” he said.

Other accidental Canadian celebs

This isn’t the first time Twitter created an accidental Canadian celeb. Remember @Rogers?

In October 2013, Glenn Rogers of Brooklyn N.Y. started getting bombarded with tweets from angry Canadians. They were upset that their Rogers cell service was down.

Rogers (the person) was the owner of the @Rogers Twitter account at the time.

“Nothing like another Rogers outage to liven up my feed. *grabs popcorn*” he tweeted on Oct. 9, in the midst of the outage.

He has since given up the @Rogers account to the company.

“Back in February I handed it over to Rogers. Those tweets of rage can now go to their rightful owner,” he told Global News in an email on Wednesday.

Here’s an interview we did with Rogers (the person) when the outage happened.

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