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Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

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Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#54

Post by jasonlbaptiste »

better question: does it produce a full follow ie- if i did this bug, would billgates actually see me in his stream? OR does it just increase the follower count+i show up on his sidebar. if its the former, then wow. I know they're clearing it out now, but somebody must have been using this for a while.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#55

Post by fname »

jasonlbaptiste wrote: post #54

better question: does it produce a full follow ie- if i did this bug, would billgates actually see me in his stream? OR does it just increase the follower count+i show up on his sidebar. if its the former, then wow. I know they're clearing it out now, but somebody must have been using this for a while.

Yes.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#56

Post by rmorrison »

savrajsingh wrote: post #49

I would guess this exploit has always been possible until today? What's interesting is that someone has probably been wielding this secret power well before it got outed here on hacker news.

Or, is there anybody whose career took off due to this bug? For example, a musician who got signed primarily because all of the top 50 music producers were following him on twitter.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#58

Post by brk »

notauser wrote: post #10
maxklein wrote: post #5

Wow, this works. SnoopDogg is now following me: http://twitter.com/snoopdogg . I'm the cartoon figure.

Bad plan to try this out with an account you value - if they can identify who has used the exploit they will probably ban you when the dust settles.

I highly doubt that. From what I'm reading on the Intarwebs, a LOT of people just couldn't resist playing with this exploit. If they truly banned everyone who did a force-follow with this hack I think they would lose a ton of people who are frankly only getting marginal value from Twitter.

I know that if I actually had to rebuild my followee list for "testing" this little hack out I would probably decide it wasn't worth the effort to start over again on Twitter.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#59

Post by doki_pen »

maxklein wrote: post #29
notauser wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad plan to try this out with an account you value - if they can identify who has used the exploit they will probably ban you when the dust settles.

Is it an exploit or is it a valid command? I don't think we hacked anything, we just typed in some text that causes people to follow us, for all we know that's a new feature of twitter.

Unfortunately, they can probably do whatever they want with this, whether people think it's fair or not.
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