14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has been the victim of another prank attack and it looks like with the site's increased popularity it’s becoming a bigger target for this type of attacks. Following last week's number of fake celebrity death rumors started by some Twitter users or even from the celebrities' hacked accounts, a move to push an explicit term on top of the trending topics was apparently orchestrated by members of the anonymous forum 4chan.
A number of 4chan members started creating fake Twitter accounts and using the term manging to take it to the top 10 trending topics on Twitter. The forum is known for its "raids," having most recently attacked YouTube in a similar fashion. The attack has since died down with the hashtag no longer in the trending topics but, once again, it brings up the increasing problems the site is having with spam, pranks and even hacking.
Last week, following Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett's real deaths, a great number of celebrity deaths were falsely reported or popularized on Twitter including Jeff Goldblum’s, George Clooney’s and even Britney Spears’s. The last one came straight from her Twitter account, which had been hacked, making it even more believable. Some of the reports were so widespread that traditional news outlets even carried the stories as fact.
These and countless other cases underline the problem Twitter and the rest of the real-time, citizen reporting services are having. While Twitter may be the fastest way for a story to spread, it can hardly be called reliable. The word-of-mouth nature of the site means that even people acting in good faith may help spread and legitimize a false story.
Twitter needs to start taking harder measures to stop these incidents from happening but some may prove easier than others. While having someone monitor the top 10 trending topics seems relatively easy and straightforward, taking steps to block the use of fake accounts for spam or these types of pranks might prove a lot more difficult.