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Tweet thieves suspended by Twitter

'Tweetdecking' plagiarists have been making thousands per month, ripping off jokes and tweets and selling retweets.
Written by
March 13, 2018
Naked Security BuzzFeed retweets SPAM tweetdeck Twitter

As BuzzFeed News so nicely put it, the Tweetdeckoning has come.
On Friday, the platform cleared house of a particular kind of leach, suspending several popular accounts known for ripping off other people’s tweets or jokes without crediting the original creator and for making money by retweeting the plagiarized content.
BuzzFeed reported in January that the so-called “tweetdeckers” are youngsters – typically in their teens and 20s – who have huge followings and who are making thousands every month by selling the retweets.
The practice, which is against Twitter’s policy against spam, gets its name from groups called “decks.” To score an invitation to join a deck, accounts usually need a follower count in the tens of thousands.
From Twitter’s spam policy, which defines spam to be, among other things…

…duplicative or substantially similar content, replies, or mentions over multiple accounts or multiple duplicate updates on one account.

Customers – both individuals and brands – pay tweetdeckers for a specified number of retweets to go out across deck member accounts with the aim of ‘going viral’. A single retweet fetches payment in the range of $5-$10. Subscriptions that last a week or month can cost several hundreds of dollars, depending on a given deck’s popularity. Some decks even hand over temporary access to the whole deck, BuzzFeed reports, something like a subscription to unlimited deck retweets.


Back in January, BuzzFeed quoted one tweetdecker who it identified as an 18-year-old from Chicago named Kendrick, or @Simpmild. He said he was making between $3,000 and $5,000 a month, and he pays members of his decks “based on who has the most page activity for the month”.

It’s the simplest thing ever, all you do is have your friends join and you have fun and tweet and make money. It’s the easiest thing ever. No hard work at all.

Kendrick had been running two of his own decks. Following Twitter’s purge, his account was suspended.
Also suspended were popular accounts including @Dory, @GirlPosts, @SoDamnTrue, Girl Code/@reiatabie, Common White Girl/@commonwhitegiri, @teenagernotes, @finah, and @memeprovider. Some had hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers.
After BuzzFeed first reported on tweetdecking in January, Twitter announced new spam-fighting changes to Tweetdeck, including removing the ability to select multiple accounts to automatically tweet, retweet, like or follow.
That’s it, game’s over, a 23-year-old tweetdecker told BuzzFeed when the changes were announced in February:

Tweetdecking is over. Our follower gains are gonna diminish.

And this is an example of how happy many Twitter users were at the idea, as choruses of “Let’s get this #TweetDeckIsOverParty started” sounded throughout the land:


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10 Comments

Anyone else find it ironic that Buzzfeed is reporting on people stealing content and reposting for profit? 99% of Buzzfeed articles are ripped off from Reddit.

Lisa, this will be a multiple part rant, for I’m an ‘equal opportunity offender’, lol…
The downtrodden innocent bystanders of both America and Britain are getting sick and tired of being sick and tired. We’re tired of the bullies on the internet, and no I don’t mean the young millennial twits, (not at this point in time) I mean Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey.
We’re tired of Zuckerberg selling our personal data and spending $2 billion on facial recognition software so he could build the world’s largest database of faces – so he could sell them to not only our government but also any other government with a few extra rubles, pesos, deutschmarks, lire or whatever. We’re tired of his utter disregard for people’s rights and his insatiable lust for power – did I forget to mention Zuck’s lust for money?
We’re tired of Jack Dorsey too, and what he’s done to twitter. Twitter used to be fun, and it morphed into the world’s fastest headlines – the place to go for all sorts of news. (I write sports and go there often) That was of course until Dorsey decided to censor the news on twitter. He committed the cardinal sin – he let his personal politics get the best of him. He decided to censor out any and all things conservative – the dreaded ‘C’ word. When twitter execs get called before congress to testify about ‘Shadow Banning’ you know there’s a problem – especially when you see the twitter guy squirm on the stand and lie like a Nazi at Nuremberg.
This latest issue with the tweet deckers? It’s not fake news but it’s tainted news… Go back and read the story again – what does it leave out? That’s right – you got it. The money that drove the scam in the first place? It was those very same big corporations and brands you mentioned. What wasn’t mentioned was any of them being suspended for violating those very same rules. The celebrities, companies and political movers and shakers financed everything. Jack knows exactly who spent the money – he has to. Heck, the tweets lead form point ‘A’ to point ‘B’. The problem however is that many of them are people jack likes. Jack is so busted…
What else? Oh yeah – We’re tired of almost anything involving alphabet letters. We’re tired of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, DARPA, the DIA, the DNI, the NRO, the GIA, the NGIA, the CSS, the DOE, the DHS, the EPA, PETA, even the NEA, the NTA and the PTA. And while we’re on a roll we’re tired of the OSS, the SIS, the GCH, the NCSC and MI5, MI6, MI7, and any more I missed. (can’t forget our Brit buddies)
We’re tired of ‘smartphones’ too – who the heck wants a phone smarter than they are anyway?
We’re tired of companies that expect all of us to have one. We’re tired of those 3 inch screens too, and idiots thinking we should pay to watch movies on them. We’re tired of people who think smart phones are ‘real computers’ – real computers don’t have 3 inch monitors.
Speaking of monitors, we’re tired of ‘touch screens’ too – the ‘touchy feely guy’ who dreamed that up should be sent directly to therapy. There are still places that fingers shouldn’t go, and things that fingers shouldn’t do. Fingers were made for picking your nose and scratching your, uh, well, never mind. But you can’t write HTML code with your finger – that takes a mouse. (and don’t get me started on mice)
Smartphones bring to mind those ‘pesky millennials’ too. We’re tired of ‘safe spaces’. When I was growing up we didn’t have ‘safe spaces’. We walked to school back then – we didn’t ride. We played in the traffic, we flirted with danger. When we fell down we got up, When we got a cut we put on a bandaid. When we broke a bone we got a cast. When a bully hit us we hit him back even harder.
We blame the schools for the crazy kids these days – schools are a lot different now. We didn’t need metal detectors and cops in the schools back then – we had knives and guns back then too but the kids knew better than to bring them to school. So what’s really changed at school that you can point a finger at? Yup, you got it – The teachers…
Remember all those hippies at Woodstock, Alameda, Monterrey, Newport, Altamonte and the Isle of Wight Festival who took the bad acid and ‘freaked out’? That’s right… You got it – college professors now, all of them.
We’re also tired of all the obscenely expensive, grossly incompetent and stupidly named government operations like ‘Operation Acoustic Kitty’ – the world’s first ever “spy cat”. A brilliant brain fart that was – the cat had a microphone implanted in its ear canal, a radio transmitter beneath its skull a wire through its skin, cost us $20 million smackers, and promptly got run over by a taxicab mere moments after being let out to do her mission in Russia.
The few things we do like include Sophos, Lisa’s pretty smile and Paul’s funny hat. (on second thought, I’m not so sure about his hat)
That’s it. (taking a deep breath now) Rant over. Truce declared. (even on alphabet initials in caps) Having said that, I’m off to take a XANAX and go back to BED.
Peace… Out.

I look forward to the book…

Ha ha… I had wondered who the moderator would be – I guess I have my answer! Don’t blame this diatribe solely on me. The Brits are so well known for their obtuse sense of humor (Monty Python comes to mind) that just getting around you guys can lead to rationality disfunction.
I’ll gladly put you on the advanced publication list for the book version, but will assure you that it will be properly displayed and not run together without paragraph breaks. It had been so long since I had written a longer comment here that I forgot that the comment spacing in your custom version of wordpress required double spacing.

One comment to Lisa before I go, then I’ll go home quietly. (promise) I just realized my comment about the tainted news might be taken as a slight to Lisa’s article – and I assure you it’s not.
Like myself I’m sure she goes as deeply as possible to research her articles, particularly on an investigative piece. The sole reason Lisa didn’t include a reference to suspending one of the companies that paid for ‘artificial viral status’ is because it never happened – Jack Dorsey didn’t do it.
And that goes to intent.
Simply put, twitter is not a forum based upon the principles of free speech – which make me enjoy the fact that Sophos’ comment section is.

What are you saying? Paul’s hat is amazing.
Heresy

You should see the crayon suit, just sayin’

And Mark, why does the crayon suit not surprise me? Perhaps because there’s a sort of lilt to his voice and gleam in his eye that would lend itself to a crayon suit!
Now, on a different note, there’s that issue about the comment spacing here – double spacing doesn’t always work with wordpress.
However…
I’ve a wee bit of Leprechaun magic in my personal kitbag, namely a snippet of HTML code that will allow me to insert a “hard line space” if you’ll allow me to try it here.
 
There, that wasn’t so hard, was it? – But you’ll have to leave the wee bit of invisible Leprechaun HTML code in place to produce the line space. If that works, what’s next?
The moon?
Mars?

I better tread lightly here I’m afraid, for the Duck’s hat has achieved a mystical sort of aura – and may possess some magical form of psychedelic Leprechaun properties. I think I find it attractive, but are those really my thoughts?

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