The guy behind @Vice_Is_Hip is getting paid to tweet for one of Uber's biggest rivals

James Cook

Feb 10, 2015, 21:44 IST

Jimmy Avis

Jimmy Avis, the man behind @Vice_Is_Hip

The man behind Vice parody Twitter account @Vice_Is_Hip has been hired by ridesharing company Gett to run its own Twitter account. It's part of a move to make the taxi app sound more "edgy" on social media.

Jimmy Avis is a former London bike courier who started the Vice Is Hip account to amuse his friends.

"I only ever set it up to make my mate laugh, and it's just grown and grown," Avis told The Kernel in 2013.

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The Vice Is Hip account parodied Vice's counter-culture coverage, mocking the tone of its stories. Here are some examples:

Meet the defrocked priest taking the sport of fencing to knife gangs in the Nairobi slums
- VICE (@Vice_Is_Hip) September 24, 2013

The Basque gangsters teaching amputees how to twerk
- VICE (@Vice_Is_Hip) September 24, 2013

Find out what happened when we played 24 hours of Need For Speed with Nicaragua's youngest sex-pest
- VICE (@Vice_Is_Hip) September 22, 2013

Mocking Vice came naturally to Avis. He used to be a member of Babyshambles, Pete Doherty's band. But that didn't last long. Avis quit after two months, blaming Doherty's drug problems.

Avis hadn't planned to tweet for a living, but he received an email from Gett, the taxi app. The company wanted someone to run its Twitter account, sharing news about the app as well as "edgy" tweets.

Gett styles itself as an ethically superior version of Uber, offering cheap rides and higher driver wages in four countries: Russia, the US, UK, and Israel.

Sure enough, Avis has made Gett's Twitter account slightly more interesting: