A New Twystery In Our Midst
By Joshua Levy, 03/19/2008 - 1:36pm

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This morning I received notifications that a slew of new Twitter users were following my tweets:

twitter notifications

"Wow, is Jim Gilmore is really starting a Twitter account now?" I didn't ask myself. Obviously someone is up to some twitchery, and I'm half-determined to get to the bottom of it.

The most recent tweet on the Gilmore account is from six days ago, and it reads, "Is Gilmore serious?. From his Website "Pro-Life activists endorse Jim Gilmore Hearing Jim Gilmore speak this past." I'm not really sure what that is supposed to mean, and there's no link to anything.

The other accounts sport similarly arcane updates: "little girl asks about the enviroment. The public service career of Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich" from DennisKucinich4; "Dr. Mark Taylor And USA180 And Senator Mike Gravel Presidential" from MikeGravel3; "John McCain in Iraq — Oops. That’s what John McCain said yesterday while in the Middle East. Standing at a" from JohnMcCain43; and so on.

There's so many urgent questions to be answered! Who's behind the accounts? What do the tweets mean? What's with the numbers? Should we even spend time unraveling this Twystery or should we let it be?

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Gilmore

Since Gilmore is the presumptive Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in Virginia, it probably isn't odd that he would have recently started twittering. However, the link you posted appears to be an unofficial, perhaps anti-Gilmore account. The official account is http://twitter.com/Gilmore4Senate

By Bill50 at Wed, 03/19/2008 - 4:38pm | login or register to post comments

I got these too

About a month ago maybe? Some kind of spam thing, I'm guessing.

By Dan Ancona at Wed, 03/19/2008 - 6:47pm | login or register to post comments

My suspicion: Twitter spam.

My suspicion: Twitter spam. The account owner(s) hope you'll see the vaguely familiar names and follow them. They'll automate posts to the account for a time (just post headlines mentioning the individual's name), until they build up a set number of followers, at which time they have a semi-captive audience to which they can blast whatever spam they want. Assuming this is all automated, it doesn't take any time to set up, and even though most followers would unfollow as soon as the spam starts, it's a way of ensuring you get delivery into what is otherwise a spam-free medium (for the time being).

I'm testing this - I just set up 'honeypot' as a Twitter ID and followed my real Twitter id (rklau). If I'm right, at some point the spammers will follow my 'real' ID, and the bot will then auto-add 'honeypot' as well. I'll report back if I get any interesting results.

-----
Rick Klau
e-mail: rick@rklau.com
weblog: http://www.rklau.com/tins/

By rklau at Mon, 03/24/2008 - 8:39pm | login or register to post comments



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