Blogging My Life...Over the weekend, several people, including myself, was hit with fake retweet spam. I should probably step back and explain what a retweet (RT) is. On Twitter, if someone likes what you say, they may retweet your tweet. The way it works is that you copy what the person said and say RT @rustybrick either before or after the copied Tweet.
The issue with this is that retweets is that there is really no way to know quickly if the person being retweeted really said what was being retweeted. I guess this is the same issue in real life. When you say, person A said XYZ about something, the only way to know for sure is to find what person A really said about it in writing or ask him directly. On Twitter it is a bit easier, cause you can basically look at that person's timeline and see if he said that or not.
So some spammer went ahead and retweeted something I and others did not tweet. It lead to some spammy site selling something. Danny captured screen shots of it for the sengineland Twitter account:
I then saw people asking me on Twitter if I said that.
For example, @doc_haliday said:
@rustybrick I really hope you are not responsible for all the douchbags RTing your tweet about some scheme and spamming trending topics.
No, I did not.
It appears like Twitter killed those accounts and the spam has been removed. But with real time services like Twitter, the damage has already been done.
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Comments
I was hit by the same, with the link pointing to a Clickbank product.
I made sure Clickbank and the product owner had a chance to know what was happening, and was contacted by them suggesting some action might happen with the perpetrator.
Posted by: Andy Beard | June 8, 2009 6:42 PM
I couldn't agree with you more about damage done. It is bad enough when someone verbally passes on something they say you said. It usually passes on to a few people before someone gets back to me and asks if I really said it. On the internet the damage is much faster and wider and harder to set right. As with all good things, like Twitter, which help us to communicate with others near and far, there are always negatives and people out there to use the technology for their own purposes which may be damaging to me. I guess it all comes down to me, or you, letting readers know what kind of person we are so others will not believe what they see.
Posted by: Chris | June 10, 2009 4:08 PM