Logged into my cycling account on Twitter this morning. At the top of “notifications” was a pretty good “scam”. A faked announcement from one top cycling team announcing they’d signed the best rider from a rival team for next season. This would be a totally shocking move. The way it’s presented on the notifications page, you can’t see the twitter handle, which had some obvious misspellings, until you click through. Which racks up another impression. I say “scam” rather than “prank” as now it’s a great wheeze for generating money through the new rewarding content creates scheme. It’s good enough to generate enough numbers to actually get pushed as a notification. Which creates a nice a snowball effect, generating more interactions and more exposure.
I expect we’ll see this sort of thing more and more. If we still use twitter, that is.
Yes, I agree it's likely this sort of thing will grow if unchecked. And (no disrepect to cycling!) that's a relatively trivial example - there's a lot more havoc that could be caused by fake BBC, UKHSA or police accounts for example.
Maybe each blocks/mute should detect at least 100 from the view count.
Logged into my cycling account on Twitter this morning. At the top of “notifications” was a pretty good “scam”. A faked announcement from one top cycling team announcing they’d signed the best rider from a rival team for next season. This would be a totally shocking move. The way it’s presented on the notifications page, you can’t see the twitter handle, which had some obvious misspellings, until you click through. Which racks up another impression. I say “scam” rather than “prank” as now it’s a great wheeze for generating money through the new rewarding content creates scheme. It’s good enough to generate enough numbers to actually get pushed as a notification. Which creates a nice a snowball effect, generating more interactions and more exposure.
I expect we’ll see this sort of thing more and more. If we still use twitter, that is.
Yes, I agree it's likely this sort of thing will grow if unchecked. And (no disrepect to cycling!) that's a relatively trivial example - there's a lot more havoc that could be caused by fake BBC, UKHSA or police accounts for example.
I just used an example to show it _was_ happening, rather than _could_ happen. :)