Twitter Travails: Pranks and Deleted Account Errors
Twitter's "Trending Topics" is a popular feature that allows you to see what are the most popular subjects being discussed on Twitter in real time. Yesterday, amid popular tweets about Wimbledon, Steve McNair, and Harry Potter, one thing seemed to be on everybody's mind: gorilla penis. Highlighting another crack in Twitter security, hackers flooded onto Twitter yesterday to create fake accounts and drive global discussions toward primate anatomy.
Called Operation Sh**ter, the attack was coordinated via a wiki on insurgen.info with specific instructions on how to carry out the prank. The page has since been taken down, but thanks to Google you can still see a cached version of the wiki. Instructions urged like-minded pranksters to sign up for fake accounts on Twitter, and start posting random (read: nonsense) posts with the hashtag '#gorillapenis' included in every message. The 4chan instructions also asked users to register eBaum's World as their location in their user profile -- eBaum's World is a hybrid Website with sections for videos, news, user-created blogs, and games.
Hashtags are a user-developed method to make it easier to search within Twitter for particular keywords. Hashtags also create a unifying thread for people posting messages about a given topic. For example, during the recent protests in the aftermath of the Iranian presidential election the hashtags '#iranelection' and '#gr88" were used to follow Tweets coming out of that country.
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