Explain This Twitter Thing... "Uhhh I seem to have accidentally walked from Davis to Harvard Sq..."

[josephineave.livejournal.com]

I have a Twitter search set up for "Davis Sq" just to see if there's anything going on that I might have missed.

I keep seeing the following message, posted by seemingly random people at random times. I did a Google search and found nothing.


Uhhh I seem to have accidentally walked from Davis to Harvard Sq…

It's been tweeted about 10 times in the last 3 days.

Anyone have a clue what it's about?

Comments

[ron_newman]

Do the people who tweet this not respond if you ask them why they tweeted it?

[josephineave.livejournal.com]

I never bothered. Seemed like a strange thing to ask someone and without some Googled info I wasn't sure what I was dealing with.

[nonelvis]

Based on the first account I found with that tweet, which had a nonsensical username of random letters and numbers, I wonder all the tweets you found were from spambots stealing tweets to look legit? All the other accounts I found had real-looking usernames, but only one of them had content I thought might actually be for real instead of random collections from a spambot.

[ron_newman]

What is the purpose of a Twitter spambot? I only see tweets from people I follow, and I only follow people and organizations that I know, so how would I ever see the output of a spambot?

[nonelvis]

They serve the same purpose as any other spambot -- cluttering the internet with search engine linkbait -- and the more real a spambot's account looks, the more likely it is to stick around for a while and keep getting indexed. You could still see the output of a spambot if it addressed you with an @ and you checked your Mentions, or if someone you follow accidentally or deliberately RT'd something from the bot.

[trysha.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of these "pseudo legit looking" accounts are used to fluff some other account's follower numbers.

[grapefruiteater.livejournal.com]

If you have a Twitter search set up, you're seeing tweets from anyone who mentions the word or phrase you're searching for. I've used this before when handling social media accounts for work. You will see quite a bit of spam/junk on Twitter if you're looking at it in this way.

[josephineave.livejournal.com]

Quite possible. Looks like a newer kind of spambot than I've seen in the past (usually no followers & only a handful of tweets, no photo or only some hot girl, no description, names don't match). Several of the tweeters were normally looking accounts -- they had followers and had a decent number of tweets -- but the closer I look at the content, there seemed a lot of nonsensical stuff and some repeated content across users. Obviously there's something going on.

The linked article seems to think it's stealing a legit tweet and repeating it in an effort to look legit.

[fappyheet.livejournal.com]

Agreed, this is random reuse by fake accounts. Regular users often get spurious favorites of your normal tweets from these spam accounts in an attempt to gather both follow-backs and seem like a legit human. Just another way they want to evade Twitter's automated spam detection.