Twitter Fakes Tweets
Jeff Elder (via John Gruber):
The tweets look completely real, but SFGate discovered that while the Twitter users who are featured are real, their tweets are not. The users featured raving about TV commercials never said anything of the kind, and were unaware their profile pics and accounts were being presented in a post on Twitter’s blog sent out to hundreds of thousands via the @Twitterads Twitter account and retweeted to more than 1.5 million.
An earlier version of this blog post included an image with mock Tweets from real users of our platform. This was not OK. Once we became aware of this mistake we took it down immediately. We deeply apologize to the three users included in the earlier images.
They seem to be saying that the “mistake” was not a technical glitch, but rather that Twitter thought real users would be OK having fake tweets attributed to them.
2 Comments RSS · Twitter
I hold no brief for Twitter, but my best guess of what happened is far more charitable to the company than either Michael's or Jesper's.
Remember that it was a mock-up of a new service to promote it, not the actual service itself, likely done by some small very group of marketing folks who were incredibly clueless enough to not realize it was "not OK" to skip the part about also mocking up lorem ipsum 'users'.
The furor alerted adult supervision.
