[liberationtech] twitter spam / porn bots affecting visibility?

[Ale Fernandez]

Hi,

Yesterday a lot of people tweeting as Julian Assange was in court found 
their twitter feeds followed by lots of spam bots with identical or 
repeating profiles and avatars. I heard during the beginning of occupy 
wall street that this was used to affect the TT status of hashtags (like 
#occupywallstreet - in the end many the first days used 
#takewallstreet), by making twitter label associated tweets in the 
"conversation" also as porn or spam.

Does anyone know more about this, and if it's been confirmed by twitter 
or someone analysing the whole thing - that it would make sense for 
someone to use these bots so as to affect the visibility of problem 
hashtags - or is it just "normal" spam?

I know from an IRC bot that was cataloguing the first tweets across 
various OWS hashtags, that there were a few of these spam bots in 
operation those first weeks.

Ale