Ask HN: Why are Twitter bots tweeting my stuff?

7 points

14 years ago

I have a few online games, that have Tweet buttons on them. Lately I've been noticing tweets from these buttons from Twitter profiles that seem to be bots. They have no profile picture, typically no followers, and only 1-10 tweets. The tweets they have seem pretty random as well. Some examples:

https://twitter.com/hamim1922

https://twitter.com/Grsdixiewp

https://twitter.com/elbunny205

https://twitter.com/ClintonGoodhue

Some of those have only one tweet, which is the one from my buttons.

What is happening here? Do Twitter bots just search the net for Tweet buttons and tweet the message from them, to make themselves look more real?

I just think this can make me look bad, particularly fake profiles with a single tweet from my page, it looks very much like I'm building up a twitter botnet to promote my stuff, which I'm absolutely not doing.

Can I stop this somehow? Generate the tweet button dynamically or something?

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