Twitter bomb

The term twitter bomb or tweet bomb (also spelled as one word) refers to posting numerous (pejoratively, "spamming") Tweets with the same hashtags and other similar content, including @messages, from multiple accounts, with the goal of advertising a certain meme, usually by filling people's Tweet feeds with the same message, and making it a "trending topic" on Twitter.[1][2][3]

It is one of the tools used in Internet activism, both by mainstream politicians like Barack Obama and by groups like Anonymous.[1][4][5] It has also been used for commercial advertising.[2]

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 use of the #dontgo hashtag relating to offshore oil drilling.[6] The term was used for other purposes in 2008, but the other meanings have since disappeared.[2]

An example of a Twitter bomb was the campaign organized by online activists in response to a July 31, 2009 Washington Post article on Hillary Clinton that was deemed sexist.[7] An even earlier example, from April 2009, referred to advertising a YouTube video series Ask a Ninja.[2] Since then, the term and tactics have entered mainstream use; in 2011 it has been used by Obama.[8]

The use of the Twitter bomb tactics has been known to misfire, as people might be offended by spamming, or trolling.[2][9]

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 to a political website, presenting negative views on the U.S. politician Martha Coakley.[10] The message might have reached about 60,000 before being eliminated by Twitter as spam.[11]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Mary C. Joyce (30 April 2010). Digital Activism Decoded: The New Mechanics of Change. IDEA. p. 221. ISBN 978-1-932716-60-3. Retrieved 30 April 2012.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Ethan Zuckerman, "The Tweetbomb and the Ethics of Attention", April 20, 2012, Last accessed on April 30, 2012.
  3. ↑ 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).
  4. ↑ John Clifford Green; Daniel J. Coffey (1 September 2010). The State of the Parties: The Changing Role of Contemporary American Parties. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 178. ISBN 978-0-7425-9954-3. Retrieved 30 April 2012.
  5. ↑ Chris Richardson (2012-04-20). "Anonymous Plans “24 Hour Tweet Bomb” To Fight CISPA". WebProNews. Retrieved 2012-04-30.
  6. ↑ Kenneth Quinnell, "Twitter Bomb", Florida Speaks blog, August 5, 2008, Last accessed on August 27, 2012.
  7. ↑ Mary C. Joyce (30 April 2010). Digital Activism Decoded: The New Mechanics of Change. IDEA. pp. 155–156. ISBN 978-1-932716-60-3. Retrieved 30 April 2012.
  8. ↑ "37K Followers Ditch Obama After Twitter Bomb - @BarackObama tweets handles of GOP legislators, state by state". Newser. Retrieved 2012-04-30.
  9. ↑ "Social Media Activism and the (In)justice of the Mob". Partisans. 2012-04-26. Retrieved 2012-04-30.
  10. ↑ 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).
  11. ↑ Neil Savage. 2011. "Twitter as Medium and Message", Communications of the ACM 54, no. 3 (March 2011), 18–20. DOI:10.1145/1897852.1897860