Can @Twitter @Safety Prevent This?

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Apparently someone at Twitter paid attention and about 10,000 fake followers got scraped off my account, but there are still about 3,500 that need to be zapped. Twitter has got to do something to eliminate this problem. People kept telling me, “You should do this” or “You should do that,” and I was like, “Why should I have to do anything? How about Twitter does something to put a stop to this abusive behavior that is used to silence, intimidate or harass people?”

We don’t have to wonder why this happened, of course, but if it weren’t for services selling fake followers — a fraudulent and dishonest practice in itself — it wouldn’t be possible for someone to plunk down X dollars for X-number of fake accounts in what was apparently an attempt to get me sent to the “Twitter gulag” (see TGDN). And, honestly, it doesn’t take a genius to spot the fake accounts:

If I can figure out what a fake account looks like — all of these were among the thousands that somebody sicced on me — then the pattern should be obvious enough that somebody at Twitter can create a software program to detect and batch-delete these spam scams. And once they figure out who is creating these phony accounts, Twitter needs to take legal action to punish this kind of fraudulent abuse.

As I said in a phone conversation with a friend — and by “conversation,” I mean, me shouting at the top of my lungs — crime is a people problem. Just identify the people responsible for the problem, get rid of those people, and you get rid of the problem. There are some people so evil that they should never be allowed to use the Internet, and at the very least, Twitter should start identifying the systematic abusers of their service and taking legal action to get those people permanently banned from using the service.

It should not be incumbent upon law-abiding honest users to take action to defend themselves against this kind of harassment. Instead, it should be incumbent upon Twitter to ensure that dishonest and abusive people are not allowed to use Twitter, period. Let them figure out who unleashed these fake Twitter accounts on me — find the person responsible — and take appropriate measures to ensure that this person is punished for their fraudulent harassment, and permanently banned from Twitter.

UPDATE: John Hoge explains:

Over the last 24 hours, around 20,000 twitter account have tried to follow my @wjjhoge account. Exactly two of them were real.
This sort of deluge of spambot followers first hit Aaron Walker (@AaronWorthing) a few days ago. Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) was added to the party a few hours after I was.

This tactic has been used as part of systematic campaigns to gulag others (ask Tossing Tomatoes) and the pattern is evident:

Bad people do bad things and get away with it, so they keep doing it. But then they try to do it to me, and that’s where their trouble begins.

Go tell Del Harvey to delete all of these fakes. Tell Del Harvey to pursue legal action against the person responsible.

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers! And, no, as of this morning, Twitter still hasn’t stopped it.

If, as I’ve been told, the going rate for fake followers is $20 per thousand, by my math (counting those fakes that were sicced on me yesterday and scraped off), someone must have spent at least $400 to inflict this plague of fake accounts on me.

 

118 comments

  1. And a corollary question is: Who controls the fake accounts? If someone went through a “buy twitter followers” service they may get more followers but that does not mean they can get all those accounts to hit the Spam Block button at the same time. They may not have any control of the accounts themselves.

    Todd Kincannon, who has 30,000+ followers, got gulaged by about 50 accounts hitting Spam Block. Ya’ll just got hit with 10,000 fake accounts yet nothing has happened so far. If they had control they could have gulaged you guys before you were even aware you were being attacked. It looks to me like someone just paid $75-$150 apiece just to annoy you. Either that or they are now looking like Sir Bedivere from the Trojan Rabbit scene in “Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail”

    Brett: Ok, we’ve added 10,000 followers to Hoge, Walker, and McCain’s twitter accounts. What now?

    Neal: Now all these accounts to hit the Spam Block button at the same time thereby consigning their Twitter accounts to suspension forever!

    Brett: Cool! Do it!

    Neal: As soon as I get control of the accounts.

    Brett: You don’t have control of the fake accounts?

    Neal: Um, not as such…

    Brett: I spent $500 on this op and all we did was annoy them!?!?

    Neal: I have great idea using Facebook to…

    Brett: If you weren’t sleeping on my couch I’d bomb the place you’re living.

  10. Fake followers shouldn’t be used for harassing people. They should be used for making your daughter’s music video the number one song on MySpace, right Brett?

  11. So, depending on your Twitter account’s settings, the 20,000 followers generated could generate 20,000 emails sent to your email address? That sounds like a huge PITA. Also, I’m surprised it isn’t legally defined as harassment.

  12. it’s sad, and quite distressing for you to say “Meh. More harassment. I’m getting used to it.”

    no one should have to get used to harassment of any kind. you, mr. mccain, mr. walker, and mr. stranahan are all getting and going thru some serious shit.
    i truly, deeply pray for all you.

  21. Twitter is, in my opinion, a very fragile architecture that is very easily exploited. I can think of several ways it could be made unusable, and possibly bring the entire service down and it would be extremely difficult for twitter to do anything about it. I could certainly target certain groups of people and make twitter basically unusable for them. I wouldn’t be prepared to discuss methods in public, though. All it takes is some programming expertise. Perl scripting would be enough. But basically the gist of it is a signal to noise thing. It is possible to create so much noise that is nearly impossible to sort out from legitimate traffic as to make the service unusable for someone and could possibly create so much noise as to crush the entire service under the load. It would take careful planning and some time to get set up, but it looks completely doable. I wouldn’t count on twitter actually surviving any sort of thoughtful attack.

  22. Oh, and for some reason a while back the same thing happened to me. I was deluged with bogus followers and I just kept blocking them as fast as they could follow. I just happened to be online when it started and I guess whoever was doing it gave up or maybe twitter noticed a lot of accounts being blocked that were all originating from the same IP address or something and throttled/blocked it, no idea. They didn’t get more than a few hundred into it before it stopped.

  23. “I’m surprised it isn’t legally defined as harassment”

    Yes it should be but:
    1 Current laws haven’t kept up with the technology
    2 Try explaining “Twitter” to a Judge/DA/SA that was born before 1960.

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