
Twitter Spam on Behalf of Bleacher Report (Time Warner) - tod222
This afternoon, while searching Twitter on the string &quot;Le’Veon Bell&quot; in the wake of his injury, I saw that the live results returned a large number of bot accounts spamming the same headline and link to a story on the site Bleacher Report. [1]<p>A subset of the bot accounts that spammed that story have Bleacher Report URLs in the majority of their links. [2]<p>Bleacher Report is owned by Turner Broadcasting System whose corporate parent is Time Warner.<p>What&#x27;s going on here?<p>Is it an independent action by a Twitter bot operator unconnected with Bleacher Report? It&#x27;s hard to believe that an outfit with corporate
roots as deep as Bleacher Report&#x27;s would stoop to Twitter spam. Has some Bleacher Report employee gone rogue and hired a Twitter bot
spammer to tout BR&#x27;s articles?<p>How is Twitter supposed to sell advertising when it appears that major potential ad buyers are instead paying spam services?<p>[1] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a3JbLls<p>[2] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a3JbLls
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detaro
Search for recent HN headlines and you'll find the same thing. I guess the
idea is to give bots the appearance of representing real users before using
them for spamming, fake followers, ... I don't think the linked sites have
anything to do with it.

