Tag Archives: great

The Great Twitter Spam Attack

You know something isn’t write when #hiring is a trending topic on Twitter, especially when it’s Recession Time. That’s indeed the case. A quick click on the keyword confirms that, here’s what the search page of #hiring looked like

spam_hiring

Out of curiousity I checked out the search page for the next trending topic i.e #tweemyjobs and here’s what I got

spam_tweenmyjobs

and this

spam_tweenmyjobs2

Yes, these two trending topics have been compromised/rigged/spammed and apparently there isn’t a genuine reason for them to be popular except for these bots. Also, if you take a closer look at the tweets here you’ll realize that the words contained in the kwip match the trending list, one for one. HOLY SHIT !! The whole trending list has been screwed badly. So as I write this post millions of users will be seeing the list of engineered topics spammed into attention. What this means is that it’s damn easy to turn the trending list upside down.

Thinking about this makes me wonder how come there aren’t any checks in place to catch hold of such things and control them ?

spam_mothersday

spam_startrek
Not only this, there are other(un-related) people who also want to cash in on the eyeballs the trending topics get and to attain that goal they start using trending topics randomly in their posts to earn some extra clicks. For ex: the one’s here

spam_hiring2

Screenshots of searh results for other trending topics dollhouse, wolverine, imax and giro

Sad but true, the integrity of  Twitter’s trending topics has been screwed.
Let’s see how this incident effects the bigger picture.

ps: excuse me for these hatrick posts on twitter, it’s just a coincidence and twitter got lucky