Dear @Twitter Security: Kill These Fake Accounts (Real People RT, Please)

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“Chadrick Shmitt MD,” “Melisa Howe II,” and roughly 5,000 more such accounts — zero Tweets, zero followers, names mismatched with handles, fake avatars, generic bromides as profile info — came swarming onto my account Wednesday night, following me in batches:

“You have 58 new followers!”

“You have 38 new followers!”

Go out to smoke a cigarette, come back 10 minutes later and there’s the message: “You have 863 new followers!”

Inquiries were made, and it turns out that this same troll-tactic harassment phenomenon has also been used in recent days against the Twitter accounts of John Hoge and Aaron Walker, who happen to be my co-defendants in a lawsuit filed by Brett Kimberlin.

Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

Evidently, this tactic is used to try to get someone’s account suspended: A troll buys fake followers for his targeted enemy’s account, which then makes it easier to then get the target account suspended. Considering that I’ve got 20,000+ real Twitter followers and run a high-activity feed, the troll had to buy thousands of fake followers in this sabotage effort, and they need to be deprived of this resource.

So, if you are one of my real Twitter followers, please re-Tweet the headline and link to this post, so that Twitter can delete the fake accounts: Roughly the 5,000 most recent accounts to follow me are all fakes. These fake followers were piling up faster than I could block them, even with mass-blocking software programs, and it should not be incumbent on the target of such vicious tactics to go through this trouble. Twitter security needs to delete these fake accounts as soon as they are exposed as such.

Twitter should delete these  5,000 or so fakes — which would re-set my follower count to around 23,000 — for starters, and then undertake an investigation to find who is responsible for this. Some people are so evil they should never have access to the Internet.

UPDATE: The do-nothing policy of @TwitterSecurity:

Twitter’s official impotence and apathy about these problems have permitted criminals to terrorize law-abiding users. They should be ashamed of themselves for tolerating — nay, actively abetting — the commercialization of fraudulent online criminal behavior.

It will not be enough for them to delete these fake accounts, although they can and should do so immediately. Twitter must investigate the persons responsible for creating such accounts — who evidently broker them — and take legal action against these fraudulent menaces, so as to prevent anyone else from profiting from this kind of evil.

 

158 comments

  3. The funny thing is that if you could block certain people from the
    internet, it would be the worst torture they could imagine. Put them in a
    palatial (but securely-fenced) estate with no duties, plenty of gourmet
    food at all hours, a swimming pool, a library stocked with every book,
    CD, and DVD they’d ever want to read, hear, or see, a host of pleasant companions, and
    every other non-electronic luxury anyone could imagine, and they’d still
    be suicidally depressed, bitter, and downright vicious if they couldn’t
    get on-line to make strangers who have never harmed them suffer in
    petty and stupid ways. They prefer lurking under electronic bridges like beasts to standing up and living like men.

  6. Twitter doesn’t care about you, or most individual users.

    They view you as parasites getting a free ride on infrastructure built so that the lumpenproles might be free to twitter away about twerking.

    The only reason leftist get treated differently is because they have staked out the inside track on the gutter culture.

  8. Actually Twitter is a lot more likely to do something TO a conservative customer than FOR them, but I’ll go along…

  9. OFA does something different.
    If you ever check out a Palin twitter feed, for example, you’ll find out that there are unique, real people who have allowed their twitter identities to be hijacked by OFA to be used as Ghost accounts. These Ghost Accounts then get used to post identical tweets critiquing Palin or some other lefty target.
    When you go into the feed, you find identical posts, mixed up in different orders, of course, but basically the ghost accounts have been turned into newsfeeds.
    It’s like a Ghost Hack from Ghost In the Shell.

  12. And then the Kimberlin Rauhauser trolls joke about us locking our accounts down when we’re away. It has unfortunately become a requirement to protect against this kind of harassment as well as illegal spam blocks.

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