Twitter Election Spam

by Christopher Paul on September 27, 2008

Just popped over to Twitter’s Election Coverage page and noticed two very odd tweeters repeatedly sending out odd tweets to the page. I went to their sites and they appear to be bots spamming Twitter’s coverage of the election. Check out these sites and you’ll see what I mean: http://twitter.com/hinnis and http://twitter.com/MonkPDX. Why do I think they’re bots?

Well, for one, they appear to be posting once a minute every minute. The general concepts of their tweets are the same, too. Hinnis, thinks Obama is a racist for his association to that church with the pastor who said things that would imply that he (the pastor) is bigoted in some way. MonkPDX appears to be praying on those who are racists (and was probably programmed by racist individuals) by calling Obama by his middle name of Hussein and saying Obama should have worn his robes and turban to the debates.

I hope I’m right in thinking these are bots releasing these tweets every minute. But the sad fact is that bot or not, someone his really thinking this hateful and misleading speak. While I’m glad that Twitter has this election coverage site, I wish they could get a hold of these bots before the site is overrun with tweets that don’t offer anything to the election debate.

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