Notes
Non-social Network
So I just got another spam follower on Twitter. It was one of the ones that, without seeing their profile, was hard to diagnose as a bot, so I clicked through to check out their profile. Sure enough, there was a picture of a scantily-clad lady with zero tweets and a bio that mentioned buying clothes and looking at her “pics.” Another night at the office then. I was just about to report her as spam (as I occasionally do when I go to the trouble of clicking through only to find out that my new follower is a robot (and not even a cool Lost-In-Space-esque robot from the ’60s)), but then I noticed something — she had followers.
I looked at her followers and they were spambots as well. Of course — these things auto-follow, don’t they! This led me to a startling conclusion: there are entire social networks made up entirely of bots; bots that auto-follow other bots because they mention in their spam tweets the topics that they themselves spam about. Thousands of Twitter profiles are connected without a single genuine user. Tweets get sent between them, but no person actually reads them. Wall-to-wall messages about looking at “pics” and yellow teeth and that damned 3-tip weight loss plan that a “mom” invented, and trending topics are appended to them so they show up in searches. What a quaint idea — a social network with no people in it.
