Hello everybody! I have an interesting and boring problem. Someone is trying to frustrate me into abandoning my Twitter username. Last night I looked away from Twitter for a period of several hours. When I looked back, I saw that I had 2,700 notifications. I thought maybe there had been a glitch -- or maybe I had finally become a movie star. The 2,700 tweets were not from adoring fans. They were from bots. Hundreds of bots were tweeting sterile greetings (good morning, hello) at me, in Japanese. Its not just me: they were tweeting at several other accounts as well. It didnt take much digging to find the root of the problem: a Twitter user with a locked, private account had my Twitter handle (@108) as part of their Twitter display name. This Twitter user is anonymous, so I cant say for certain what sorts of tweets their 500-some tweets are in nature. Because the Twitter account is private, I cannot see who this account follows, and I cant see who follows this account. Heck, I cant even see the date the account was created, which is another detail Twitter graciously hides for anyone who locks their account. I predict it is bots following that account. I predict these are the sorts of bots that follow back anyone who follows them. These bots then send greetings to anyone who tweets at them. Say I tweet Time for bed! One bot might reply, Goodnight! Japanese Twitter users love this sort of thing. I mean, I presume they do, because all these bots are Japanese, and they all have names and avatars which correspond to anime, comic book, or game characters. When one of these bots says Goodnight, they say it the way their anime character would. For example, a little tiny girl maid character might say, Goodnight! Sleep well, master~~~. Fans of characters make these bots so that they can have their favorite videogame characters responding to them whenever they tweet certain key phrases. So heres how this becomes maybe an interesting story. The Twitter user who is harassing me has my Twitter name (@108) in their display name. The display name is the name that appears next to your Twitter handle when you tweet. Mine is tim rogers, so my Tweets come from tim rogers (@108). This frustrating individuals Twitter display name is multiple short Twitter names, @ marks and all: @666 @108 @6666 @jjj. When a Japanese anime character greeting bot addresses one of its Twitter followers, it dips into the users profile and extracts the display name. If one of these bots were tweeting at me, itd be saying, Goodnight, tim rogers! Sleep well! -- itd keep my curious lack of capitalization. When a bot replies to this particular frustrators Twitter, it looks like this: Goodnight, @666 @108 @6666 @jjj! Sleep well! Of course, the tweet starts with the persons Twitter handle: its an @-reply, so it needs to start with one of those. What I wanted to do was block this person in a way that would never show me any mentions of them ever again. Its simple: if I can block or hide any or all tweets that mention that particular persons Twitter account name, then Id never have to see any of the bot tweets. Twitter blocking doesnt work this way. Blocking someone means they cant follow you and you cant follow them (unless you un-block them). It also means they cant tweet at you. However, if someone tweets at me and they happen to mention a person I blocked in the same tweet, Ill still see the tweet. This person flooding my mentions isnt mentioning me -- other accounts are mentioning me, and always also mentioning that person at the same time. Before I went to bed, I sent a follow request to the perpetrator. I wanted to see if it was a bot that had accidentally fallen down a snowball-hill of auto-follow-back bots. When I woke up this morning, I had 44,000 notifications on Twitter. The perpetrator had refused my Twitter follow request. They had also changed their Twitter bio text. Previously it had been blank. Now it is ice-cold and simple, and it confirms my suspicions about them. This Twitter users bio now is . . . Please change your ID. Twitter will not let me report this Twitter user for harassment. In order to report a user for harassment, I have to paste direct links to tweets from this person into the complaint form. If the person had deleted their harassing tweets that would be one unfortunate thing. That the Twitter account is private, meaning I cant see any of their tweets, much less link one, is another unfortunate thing. The most unfortunate thing, then, is that this person technically is not themselves doing anything Twitter considers harassment. They are merely harnessing the collective knuckle-draggery of a gaggle of bots (some of which have literally a million tweets!). What Id most like is if blocking someone on Twitter blocked all of their mentions, even those containing mentions of myself. At present, my Twitter is useless to me. For over twenty-four hours my notifications tab has been an ocean of useless tens of thousands of tweets. Over a hundred thousand tweets poured in today. Its so many tweets that I cant even see tweets from people that I follow. Even if I click people I follow on the Twitter website, I cant see any tweets from people I follow. The bot tweets are flowing in at such a pace that Twitter itself cannot process them. I accidentally clicked 1,400 new notifications on Twitter a few minutes before typing this post and what happened then almost crashed my computer (and ultimately only crashed my browser). So yeah, this is weird, and this is dumb. I might not be able to use Twitter for a while. I sent a couple emails to their support, though its largely useless. This malicious user had another account they were using last night -- a similar one which was a different permutation of 0s and Os. It too was targeting a long string of Twitter users with short handles. Probably this person wants the short Twitter names for selling at auction. This is the weirdest and dumbest thing. Another weird and dumb thing I understand is that Twitters spambot deletion service is automated: if someone gets enough complaints, theyre gone. So yeah. Uh, if you are on Twitter, can you check out twitter/ooo000oooo0oo and report them for spam? And if you feel like maybe helping me out, could you tweet to your Twitter followers and ask them to report this person as spam, too? I mean, you dont have to do that last part. Im sure if I can get like fifty people to report this person as spam, theyll get cut off. Id like to use my Twitter again. In closing: yes, this has happened three times in two years, since I first got my three-numeral Twitter username. I expect theyre going to try to hack my Paypal, next. Earth is weird, man. Maybe this is an interesting journalism story in the making. Uh, doesnt anyone know someone at Twitter who I could talk to about this (and about a few other things)?
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 08:04:11 +0000
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