Twitter scam, or… what?

Posted on November 4, 2009 by Ian Betteridge

Does anyone know what the point of this is? It looks like lots of Twitter accounts (bots?) reposting exactly the same message. There’s no links to anything. If you go to their pages, there’s no dodgy links either. So what’s going on?

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  • Lee

    Bots filling their posting histories to make them seem like real people (albeit with bot-esque user names). Presumably avoiding some imagined Twitter anti-spam mechanism.

  • http://Website(optional) Rowan

    Echoing Lee here; reposts of stuff to make the accounts look more real. I keep a search active for the name of an open source project I work on (Twitter is great for getting really honest feedback as it’s unsolicited!) and saw a tweet I was sure I’d seen before – when I looked into it, a spam bot was reposting tweets from other users, often after a significant delay.

    In this case the original looks like it was the genuine martinxo – http://twitter.com/martinxo/status/2798178050 . Perhaps they even tweet-copy from accounts with reasonable follower accounts in an attempt to get real followers for themselves? Can’t imagine a scattershot bot would have much luck with that though…