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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, Insightful) by moondrake on Thursday May 07 2015, @11:40AM

    by moondrake (2658) on Thursday May 07 2015, @11:40AM (#179849)

    eh...you are not seriously proposing giving our biggest troll more air time?

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @04:45PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @04:45PM (#179977)

    Oh please, this guy is just a lame broken record. The only big thing here is his head.

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @08:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @08:34PM (#180063)

    Why not?

    Are you afraid of his words?

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @08:51PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @08:51PM (#180066)

      > Are you afraid of his words?

      Yes, the righteous power of his words have me cowering in fear!!!!