Twitter Caught Faking Tweets To Promote Its Ad Platform

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Twitter Caught Faking Tweets To Promote Its Ad Platform

engine

2:09 pm on Jul 24, 2013 (gmt 0)

What!

That's territory no professional company should be straying into. Credibility drops significantly.

Twitter posted on its blog today about a new, wider release of an integration the company is doing with TV commercials. In the blog post is a shot of a new Twitter ads dashboard showing tweets from Twitter users raving about TV commercials.

The tweets look completely real, but SFGate discovered that while the Twitter users who are featured are real, their tweets are not. The users featured raving about TV commercials never said anything of the kind, and were unaware their profile pics and accounts were being presented in a post on Twitter’s blog sent out to hundreds of thousands via the @Twitterads Twitter account and retweeted to more than 1.5 million.

The users were not pleased when they saw these bogus tweets attributed to them for the first time – after the post went up.Twitter Caught Faking Tweets To Promote Its Ad Platform [blog.sfgate.com]

bhonda

2:58 pm on Jul 24, 2013 (gmt 0)

Bet there's something in the Twitter terms and conditions that allow Twitter to use user's names and profile images in advertising.

Any volunteers to check?

Not saying that it's right, I'm just not surprised.

If it was a mistake, fine. If it was done intentionally, then it's good PR. How many more people are going to read this release now that this has happened.

RhinoFish

5:23 pm on Jul 24, 2013 (gmt 0)

Using a name and profile, never includes false claims of endorsement. Twitter called it "confusion", knock #2.
#truecolors