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Weev Demonstrates Trolling Women and People of Color Via Promoted Tweets

posted by CoolHand on Thursday May 07 2015, @09:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the new-platform-trolling dept.

Ethanol-fueled and darkfeline wrote in with an Ars Technica article on a demonstration of how promoted tweets can be easily abused:

Promoted tweets have been part of the Twitter service since 2010, and they've allowed advertisers to pick and choose who sees specific ads based on "what a user chooses to follow, how they interact with a Tweet, what they retweet, and more." But users have found how loosely those ads are monitored or filtered before they reach users' eyeballs—and how cheap, fast, and easy the system can be exploited to annoy users as opposed to "engaging" them.

"I decided to spend a few pennies on Twitter ads today," [Weev's] post started, and he asserted that the platform's pricing structures "don't seem to take into account that one might want only to generate negative reactions to ad campaigns." Though Auernheimer didn't say exactly which users/groups he chose to target in his trolling campaign, he listed examples that appeared to jive with the sample of angry responses that followed: people who are active in Democratic political campaigns or animal rights groups; women who shop for fine jewelry; followers of known feminist sites like Jezebel and Feministing.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Sir Finkus on Thursday May 07 2015, @09:59AM

    by Sir Finkus (192) on Thursday May 07 2015, @09:59AM (#179832) Journal

    Damn, used [] instead of and now I look a fool. It's not the first time, and it won't be the last.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Informative=1, Funny=1, Total=2
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   4  

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday May 07 2015, @11:10AM

    by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Thursday May 07 2015, @11:10AM (#179844) Homepage
    The markup you are looking for is ``"'' (as per text), or "``" and "''" (as per TeX).
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

    • (Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Friday May 08 2015, @10:27AM

      by Magic Oddball (3847) on Friday May 08 2015, @10:27AM (#180265) Journal

      To add to your post, since Slashcode's HTML interpreter ate it: the markup symbols surrounding tags are < (Less Than) and > (Greater Than).

      For writing out explanations:

      *Code* *Displays As*
      &amp;   &
      &lt;    <
      &gt;    >

      If the above is horribly mis-aligned, you probably have your browser set to display monospaced text using a proportional font. :-p

  • (Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Thursday May 07 2015, @01:55PM

    by dyingtolive (952) on Thursday May 07 2015, @01:55PM (#179903)

    Pfft, this ain't yo mamma's stale ass bbcode son. This is slashcode, bro.

    --
    Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!