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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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Thursday May 07 2015, @03:50PM
However, that's just cover for him to indulge in picking on the disempowered. If he weren't a shitstain he would have demonstrated the problem by picking on the empowered - instead of sending white-power advertisements to non-whites, he would have sent black-power advertisements to rich white racists.
Or, he could have done both so that no one could accuse him of being personally in favor of either viewpoint, and only being an equal-opportunity troll looking to get a rise out of people.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @04:09PM
> Or, he could have done both so that no one could accuse him of being personally in favor of either viewpoint, and only being an equal-opportunity troll
The whole "I hate all people equally" thing is bogus misdirection. It's like saying - I don't discriminate by age, I punch babies but I also punch adults so its all good! No matter what else you do, it is cowardly to attack people who can't hurt you back.