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Twitter impersonation cases are out of control
4 points by eramirem on April 21, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments
The Twitter Rules say: "Impersonation: You may not impersonate others through the Twitter service in a manner that does or is intended to mislead, confuse, or deceive others". I have detected an account (very likely to be a bot) that is posting exactly the same tweets I post, with 5-minutes delay; including mentions and pictures, which mislead people who is being mentioned. That is clearly an impersonation case, but Twitter says that they don't mediate user content UNLESS it violates the Twitter Rules.

Doesn't a bot that replicate your tweets violate the Twitter Rules? Is being Twitter negligent?



The answer from Twitter Support, they just focused on the bot account profile picture.

"Hello,

Thanks for providing this information. As a policy, we do not mediate user content, including images, unless it violates the Twitter Rules (https://twitter.com/rules). Based on this policy, we will not remove the reported image."


Have you tried reporting impersonation? You can do that here: https://support.twitter.com/forms/impersonation


I have reported the issue twice, but Twitter said that since I don't have copyright on the profile picture, they do nothing.


But it's not just the profile picture, it's replicating your tweets too, right? That's got to count for something.


yeap, still no solution from Twitter Support. That's frustrating.


Seems like an script is using your account to grow something that looks like a valid user, then they will start spamming. Sadly, twitter doesn't care about non-famous users.


Pretty scary this new trend. They could create a replication bot and get seemingly original content avoiding deletion for spam from twitter, but still being able to inject spam in some of the tweets.


I suspect that Twitter's response would be very different if you had a - EXPENSIVE - verified account.




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