
Brands pay Twitter to falsely appear in your following list - Bill_Dimm
https://gigaom.com/2014/12/30/brands-pay-twitter-to-falsely-appear-in-your-following-list/
======
x5315
This was a bug. We rectified it as soon as the issue was brought to our
attention.

The original version of this product launched in March 2013. Its intention was
to just "bump" brands in your follow lists to the top, not to start placing
Promoted Accounts randomly in the list—what the headline suggests. That was
the bug.

~~~
jacquesm
Your account appears to be 100% anonymous and does not have any clear link
with twitter that implies that you are really speaking for the company. Unlike
say Matt Cutts saying something about Google handling spam.

I'm a bit skeptical about 'bugs' like this lasting for over a year and a half
without there being some kind of intent involved. It's hard to imagine how
this bug could have come into existence in the first place, harder still to
imagine that code review and testing didn't catch it and that nobody
complained about it in the meantime.

Random accounts appearing in followed/follower lists would be weird enough
given that that is core twitter functionality but to have that happen
specifically to promoted accounts would appear to be by design rather than by
accident, _especially_ if those promoted accounts did not appear in the lists
to begin with. That would require some serious overriding and additional logic
unless twitter is implemented in an unlogical way.

To put it plain: a change in sort order does not normally change the contents
of the lists, that requires a lot more work and is usually not unintentional.

~~~
x5315
Sorry, this is me: [http://twitter.com/x5315](http://twitter.com/x5315). I'll
update my bio, how's that?

The 'bug' didn't last for over a year and a half. The product has existed for
that long.

The bug was in the advertiser selection process. There was an issue with the
job/dataset we use to select which advertisers to choose. It should only have
been people in the follow lists.

As for "a change in sort order does not normally change the contents of the
lists". Due to the size of some of the lists, we don't load the entire list
when we show you the first 20 or so. Therefore, we would require an insertion
process.

~~~
pc86
Thank you for clarifying this. I'm obviously not familiar with Twitter's code
to any extent, but it seems reasonable you'd need the insertion process
regardless.

Out of curiosity, can you speak to how long this bug actually appear in the
wild before it was corrected?

------
jorgecastillo
I can't see how people tolerate Twitter's ad policy, I don't even use an ad
blocker (I white list JS) but I find Twitter ads too annoying to use the
service.

~~~
roma1n
Someone suggested to report every 'promoted tweet' (ad) as unwanted/spam.
That's what I do currently.

~~~
icebraining
That sounds like a good way to have your reports ignored by the system.

~~~
zecho
Doing so also blocks the brands from showing up as ads, in addition to
blocking them from organically appearing in your timeline. It's a strategy
that works well, imo.

------
Animats
You're not Twitter's customer. You're the product.

(I once experimented with a Twitter client that did spam filtering, but it was
clear that Twitter would never approve it. We need AdBlock for Twitter.)

