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January 24th, 2013

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Be careful what you say on Twitter.

That’s the lesson likely learned by Venstre politician Timo Jensen, who has found himself in the midst of a social media storm after his comment about pop star and X Factor judge Anne Linnet.

Jensen reacted to a story in Berlingske newspaper reporting that 59-year-old Linnet’s 26-year-old wife Tessa Franck Linnet was expecting a son with the following tweet:

“Come on, Anne Linnet is not having a child. Her partner is having a child with a donor. LOL. #dkpol #sickworld.”

Jensen’s tweet set off a flood of responses from Twitter users, including a number of journalists and fellow politicians.

While Jensen was receiving a barrage of comments on Twitter, the deputy chairman of the Zealand Regional Council’s ethics committee remained silent for the better part of Thursday before speaking to Berlingske in an attempt to clarify himself.

“It is a big misunderstanding,” Jensen said. “I don’t have anything against lesbians being inseminated, I have no problems with that. I was sitting there and looking at my mobile phone when I saw a headline that said that Anne Linnet is expecting a child. I thought, ‘What is that about?’, that is totally far out that she should be a mother at her age.”

He said he reacted too quickly to the article’s “misleading” headline and then took back to Twitter to decry the fall-out from the comment as the byproduct of a gossip-obsessed media environment. He also stressed that his comment did not represent the views of Venstre.

Twitter user Tenna Riis Sørensen summed the mess quite nicely when she tweeted “Some politicians should maybe avoid Twitter.”

The ‘sick world’ controversy follows the publication of a column in metroXpress newspaper earlier this month in which Mette Hjermind Dencker, an MP for far-right party Dansk Folkeparti, wrote that being a homosexual, a single parent or leaving home before turning 18 years-old was unnatural. She later issued an apology.