Fake presidential candidate spam comes to Twitter

I woke up this morning to find that a number of current and former presidential candidates were following me on my Twitter account. Or at least their fake profiles were — BarackObama4, MikeHuckabee47, SamBrownback4, etc. (I’m not going to link to them).

The fake profiles are full of messages like excerpts from news stories about each candidate, along with nonsensical statements about them.

One of the many reasons people love Twitter’s messaging service is that it is largely spam-free, as others have recently noted. Unlike your email inbox, there’s no clever way for a spam company to get a client’s message in your face, without your permission.

But spammers typically target any web service that’s popular, so maybe this morning’s fake followers are really just another sign of Twitter’s increasing popularity. If third-party web analytics firm Compete is to be believed, Twitter’s number of unique visits grew 4,368 percent over the last twelve months, to more than four million visits this past February (our coverage).

And, after all, real presidential candidates like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are also using Twitter, or at least it seems so. In fact, Obama has one of the most followed Twitter profiles (and he’ll automatically follow you back if you follow him).

In the case of the fake candidates’ profiles, here’s what Twitter cofounder Biz Stone tells me:

Looks like somebody created these profiles by hand last October and then maybe created a bot to follow lots of folks. (For some reason, people do this because they think folks will follow them back.) This is considered abuse and we’ll take care of it now. Thanks for calling it to our attention.