Twitter bomb
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The term twitter bomb or tweet bomb (also spelled as one word) refers to posting numerous (pejoratively, "
spamming Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, for any prohibited purpose (especial ...
") Tweets with the same
hashtag A hashtag is a metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash (also known as pound or octothorpe) sign, ''#''. On social media, hashtags are used on microblogging and photo-sharing services such as Twitter or Instagram as a form of user-generated ...
s and other similar content, including @messages, from multiple accounts, with the goal of
advertising Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers. It is typically used to promote a ...
a certain
meme A meme ( ) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural i ...
, usually by filling people's Tweet feeds with the same message, and making it a "
trending topic Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
" on Twitter.
Ethan Zuckerman Ethan Zuckerman (born 1973) is an American media scholar, blogger, and Internet activist. He was the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, and Associate Professor of the Practice in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT until May 2020, and the aut ...

"The Tweetbomb and the Ethics of Attention"
April 20, 2012, Last accessed on April 30, 2012.
J. Ratkiewicz, M. D. Conover, M. Meiss, B. Gonçalves, A. Flammini, F. Menczer
"Detecting and Tracking Political Abuse in Social Media"
''Proc. 5th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media'' ICWSM (2011).
This may be done by individual users, fake accounts, or both.


Advertising

Twitter bombing may be used for commercial advertising. An early example from referred to advertising a
YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...
video series
Ask a Ninja Ask A Ninja is a series of comedy videos about the image of ninja in popular culture available in podcast and vodcast form, as well as in mov and WMV file formats. The episodes were released between 2005 and 2011. In December 2007, television i ...
.


Politics

Twitter bombing is one of
the tools ''The'' () is a grammatical Article (grammar), article in English language, English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite ...
used in
Internet activism Internet activism is the use of electronic communication technologies such as social media, e-mail, and podcasts for various forms of activism to enable faster and more effective communication by citizen movements, the delivery of particular infor ...
, both by mainstream politicians like
Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...
and by groups like
Anonymous Anonymous may refer to: * Anonymity, the state of an individual's identity, or personally identifiable information, being publicly unknown ** Anonymous work, a work of art or literature that has an unnamed or unknown creator or author * Anonym ...
. The earliest recorded usage of the Twitter bomb is from August 2008, when it was used by bloggers Liza Sabater and Kenneth Quinnell in response to
Republican Republican can refer to: Political ideology * An advocate of a republic, a type of government that is not a monarchy or dictatorship, and is usually associated with the rule of law. ** Republicanism, the ideology in support of republics or agains ...
use of the #dontgo
hashtag A hashtag is a metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash (also known as pound or octothorpe) sign, ''#''. On social media, hashtags are used on microblogging and photo-sharing services such as Twitter or Instagram as a form of user-generated ...
relating to
offshore oil drilling Offshore drilling is a mechanical process where a wellbore is drilled below the seabed. It is typically carried out in order to explore for and subsequently extract petroleum that lies in rock formations beneath the seabed. Most commonly, the te ...
.Kenneth Quinnell
"Twitter Bomb"
Florida Speaks blog, August 5, 2008, Last accessed on August 27, 2012.
The term was used for other purposes in 2008, but the other meanings have since disappeared. An example of a Twitter bomb was the campaign organized by online activists in response to a July 31, 2009 ''
Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...
'' article on
Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton ( Rodham; born October 26, 1947) is an American politician, diplomat, and former lawyer who served as the 67th United States Secretary of State for President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, as a United States sen ...
that was deemed
sexist Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on one's sex or gender. Sexism can affect anyone, but it primarily affects women and girls.There is a clear and broad consensus among academic scholars in multiple fields that sexism refers primaril ...
. In 2011, it was used extensively by Barack Obama's campaign staff to encourage his followers to contact Congress and encourage them to reach a compromise during the
United States debt-ceiling crisis of 2011 The 2011 United States debt-ceiling crisis was a stage in the ongoing political debate in the United States Congress about the appropriate level of government spending and its effect on the national debt and deficit. The debate centered on the ...
. Shortly thereafter, @BarackObama lost about 37,000 followers.


Positive impacts

Twitter bombing/spamming can provide exposure to current events that are not being exposed enough from mainstream media. Dhiraj Murthy writes:
Twitter has received significant media attention in its use to disseminate information during disasters, including the 2008 Mumbai bomb blasts (Dolnick, 2005) and the January 2005 crash of US Airways flight 1549 (Beaumont, 2009).
Linking this with the use of hashtag, see hashtag activism, news and information can be spread around the internet at a rapid pace with the use of hashtags.


Comparison to online spam

The use of the Twitter bomb tactics has been known to misfire, as people might be offended by spamming, or
trolling In slang, a troll is a person who posts or makes inflammatory, insincere, digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages online (such as in social media, a newsgroup, a forum, a chat room, a online video game), or in real life, with the int ...
. Spammers have several goals, which are phishing, advertising, or malware distribution. Unlike traditional online spamming, such as email, Twitter has a limit of only 280 characters per tweet. Therefore, a Twitter bomb often include URLs in their tweets in order to send others users to their malicious pages online.Song, Jonghyuk, Sangho Lee, and Jong Kim."Spam filtering in twitter using sender-receiver relationship." ''Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection''. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011. Unlike email spam, Twitter bombs may require participation from their targeted users. Fake accounts are a common source of Twitter bombs. In order to avoid Twitter's spam filters and to overcome their lack of followers, Twitter bombs are often sent as a reply to existing tweets about the same topic. This is done in hopes that the authors of the existing tweets will retweet the response to their own followers, spreading the Twitter bomb before the fake account is deleted. With regards to numbers, an example of a Twitter bomb analyzed in one research paper described how nine fake user accounts produced 929 tweets in 138 minutes, all with a
URL A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifie ...
to a political website, presenting negative views on the U.S. politician
Martha Coakley Martha Mary Coakley (born July 14, 1953) is an American lobbyist and lawyer who served as Attorney General of Massachusetts from 2007 to 2015. Prior to serving as Attorney General, she was District Attorney of Middlesex County from 1999 to 20 ...
.P. Metaxas, E. Mustafaraj
"From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-Time Search"
''In: Proceedings of the WebSci10: Extending the Frontiers of Society On-Line, April 26-27th, 2010, Raleigh, NC: US (2010).
The message might have reached about 60,000 before being eliminated by Twitter as spam.Neil Savage. 2011
"Twitter as Medium and Message"
''
Communications of the ACM ''Communications of the ACM'' is the monthly journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). It was established in 1958, with Saul Rosen as its first managing editor. It is sent to all ACM members. Articles are intended for readers with ...
'' 54, no. 3 (March 2011), 18–20
DOI:10.1145/1897852.1897860
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Criticism

Many Twitter users find comfort in sharing their ideas and thoughts to the general public. Though Twitter can be utilized to spread awareness of a variety of issues an

many can take advantage and post numerous tweets that may be viewed as spam. Twitter's rul
page
considers tweets "spam" once a user displays multiple tweets with unrelated hashtags to a certain topic, or continues to post multiple tweets of the same content in one account. Some instances, these tweets can be viewed as trolling once they begin to seek out other Twitter users for arguments about controversial issues.


See also

* Google bomb *
Social bot A social bot, or also described as a social AI or social algorithm, is a software agent that communicates autonomously on social media. The messages (e.g. tweets) it distributes can be simple and operate in groups and various configurations with ...


References

{{Twitter Navigation Culture jamming Internet-based activism Internet slang Twitter 2000s neologisms