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Director Bill Condon answers a question during a press conference for the movie "The Fifth Estate" during the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto on Friday, Sept. 6, 2013.Galit Rodan/The Canadian Press

Julian Assange and his Wikileaks team may be masters of the Internet who can expose governments' top secrets, but there's one area of the new media where they seem to be a little lacking: the art of the Twitter zinger.

Partway through yesterday's round tables for The Fifth Estate, the TIFF opening night film about Wikileaks, a journalist asked director Bill Condon and screenwriter Josh Singer about their reaction to Wikileaks' latest tweet about the film, which had been sent just 20 minutes earlier. The tweet read: "Prediction: The Fifth Estate will be a commercial failure, because it fails to understand that its market is the population not aging power."

Condon, puzzled, asked to look at the reporter's phone to read it for himself.

He repeated the phrase: "'Its market is the population' – I'm having a problem with the syntax."

"I don't get it," said Singer.

Condon repeated the tweet aloud again before he handed the phone back and said: "Could you ask him for a clarification?"

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