Clueless About Twitter

[gonzo]

Around noon Pacific time today, a small memebroke out on the Internet. At nearly the exact same time, over a dozen Twitter accounts all tweeted out the message “Oh i had the day off work lol. thats why im home.” All were sent outfrom what appear to be the Twitter accounts of cute girls. Why? Because they’re all automated spam accounts set up by some lame online dating site.

Spamming a social network by creating fake accounts with pictures of cute girls is as old as social networking itself. But this one on Twitter is tricky because when you look all the accounts individually, they look like they may be legit. All use different names, have different pictures and use different bios. But all link to the same site (with the same BS ad campaign URL) and all have tweet streams that are exactly the same, word for word.

It looks like this Singlesnet site (or someone trying to reap the affiliate benefits) built a grass-roots spamming campaign of Twitter with these girls. But what’s odd is that it seems to be working somewhat. While most of these accounts seem to be following a good number of fake accounts — ones with no profile pictures and no updates — they all appear to have a good number (in the hundreds) of what appear to be real followers. Whether its the cute icons, mundane fake updates or number of legit followers that leads others to follow them, I couldn’t tell you. But people are following the fake girls.

And if you were only following one of them, it’d be hard to know that they were fake. Some have the same pink flower background (seen in the screenshot below), but not all do — tricky. But the two tell-tale signs are if their bio links to that Singlesnet site, or if they tweeted the magic words today, “Oh i had the day off work lol. thats why im home.”

Previous fake tweets included “Getting ready for work! Hehe just got out of the shower pervs” — always a winner.

I’m not sure that the bios in these fake Twitter accounts aren’t populated from real bios for real girls on the dating site, but the tweets are definitely all BS. Hope you didn’t try to set up a date with one of these girls.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/18...f-of-work-lol/