The stars are liars: How Twitter outs celebrity smartphone shills

This is not Carly Rae Jepsen's real phone. The picture comes from Jepsen’s latest video, "This Kiss," which prominently featured a Nokia Lumia 900. Like any product placement deal, she was well compensated for the plug. But once she’s off-set, Jepsen’s tweets still carry a telltale "Twitter for iPhone" tag. And she’s not alone.

After a bit of digging, the Verge also found Rita Ora tweeting from a Blackberry and Greek pop star Anna Vissi tweeting from an iPhone, after both had featured Windows Phones in their videos. (A Lumia 900 in "How We Do" and a Lumia 800 in "Tiranniemai," respectively.) When you throw in Oprah’s recent tweet endorsing Microsoft’s Surface — which happened to be sent from an iPad — celebrity tech endorsements have had an extremely embarrassing few weeks. In part, it's because there are just so many endorsements. Personal computing is increasingly moving from the desktop to mobile, forcing aging titans like Microsoft to bet the farm on the newest generation of Windows-equipped Phones, and flood every conceivable medium with ads to that effect. Apple and the Android crowd have responded with their own salvo. The result is record number of celebrities committed to one mobile OS or another. From James Franco making skate videos on a Samsung tablet to Marty Scorsese dueting with Siri in the back of a cab, celebrities have become a mainstay in smartphone and tablet marketing.