Kansas Teen Twitter Sensation; Followers Grow 100-Fold Following Remark About Governor

By Chad Garrison on Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 8:17 am

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Last week Emma Sullivan of the Kansas City suburb of Fairway, Kansas, had 65 followers on Twitter. Right now she has 6,200 and rising. Her meteoric surge in popularity stems from a Tweet made from her phone last Monday when Sullivan was attending a speech from Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback:

Kansas Teen Twitter Sensation; Followers Grow 100-Fold Following Remark About Governor

Turns out that Sullivan didn't actually say anything to the governor that day. Nevertheless, the governor's handlers saw Sullivan's tweet and told her principal about it at Shawnee Mission East High School. The principal had demanded that Sullivan write an apology to the governor. But she's not going to. She tells the Associated Press that she disagrees with Brownback's decision to cut funding for the arts in Kansas. And to her growing Twitter followers, she writes:

Strong words, indeed. Though she really should have kept that "heblowsalot" hashtag. That was classic.