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

  1. Would persons affected by this sort of bombardment, or even who use the service in general, have any method of bringing action against the fakers (and/or Twitter for shutting down the accounts of the innocent but bombarded), perhaps as a class action?

  4. Given that twitter is a free service offered to willing participants, who must agree to be bound by twitters own TOS, the answer is not a chance in Hell.

  8. My God! They’re one in the same!

    Of course, he’ll deny it. But remember, never listen to the demon for he lies!

  10. 5000 purchased follows: $20

    Rampant speculation about what they mean: $0

    Watching R.S. McCain shout about his victimization: priceless

  11. Ok, I just finished transferring the names from my secret audio program to vinyl and if you play the record backwards at quarter speed, the names associated with those twitter accounts sound like a bunch of static…BUT, if you listen closely while playing Phil Collins at a very low volume, you can clearly hear:

    Kill Whitey

    So, I’m going to assume it’s Al Sharpton…or someone else, probably.

  14. Why should Twitter do anything?

    I still don’t get the appeal of Twitter. It’s reflex glossolalia, and leads to more problems than solutions.

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