Actor Ashton Kutcher was among the first celebrities who really mastered Twitter. He even challenged CNNto see who could hit 1 million followers first, way back in the dawn of the celeb-tweet era – two whole years ago.

But a quick message about now-ousted Penn State Coach Joe Paterno, dashed off before Kutcher knewthe whole story, has him reconsidering things.

About 1 p.m. Thursday, Kutcher tweeted a link to ablog post detailing how he unwittingly created a maelstrom of controversy. He said he caught a quick TV headline about Paterno losing his job and “assumed that he had been fired due to poor performance as an aging coach. ” Without knowingthe actual story, Kutcher said, ” I posted a tweet defending his career.”

To put it mildly, that did not go over well. Once Kutcher had learned of the entire situation at Penn State, he said he “quickly went back on my Twitter account and found a hailstorm of responses calling me an idiot’ and several other expletives.” He apologized, but the controversy has him considering professional management of his feed.

“I quickly retracted and deleted my previous post,” he wrote. “However that didn’t seem enough to satisfy people’s outrage at my misinformed post. I truly am sorry if I offended anyone and more over am going to take action to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”

By handing over the tweet reins.

“While I will continue to express myself through @Aplusk I’m going to turn the management of the feed over to my team at Katalyst Media to ensure the quality of its content,” Kutcher wrote. “My sincere apologies to anyone who I have offended. It was a mistake that I don’t think will happen again.”

- Jennifer Brett/The Buzz/jbrett@ajc.com