Celebrity-poaching Twitter bug 'accidental'

A Twitter glitch has allowed users to game the popularity contest by making it appear that celebrities had subscribed to read their mini-blog postings known as tweets.

The flaw, which Twitter said it has fixed, allowed users to add anyone else as a follower of their tweets. Normally, the other person has to initiate such "following."

The flaw is believed to have been discovered by a Turkish Twitter user who unwittingly discovered the new technique while giving the thumbs-up to one of his favourite artists.

Technology blog Gizmodo said borakrc had tweeted "accept pwnz" as a show of respect to Accept, a German heavy metal band whose most popular album was 1983's Balls to the Wall.

When borakrc next checked his followers, he saw that a Twitter account called pwnz had been added to them. He is believed to have told his girlfriend and together, they added celebrities to their followers lists.

The borakrc Twitter account has since been suspended.

Gizmodo quickly published a guide, called How to Force Anyone to Follow You on Twitter, explaining how to take advantage of the bug.

The flaw worked in a similar manner to established Twitter commands, such as "follow [name]" which adds the user's name to someone else's list of followers.

Typing "accept [name]" is believed to have created a follow request from the name typed into the command and then executed it, resulting in the unwitting person's account being forced into following.

Gizmodo demonstrated this by showing American talk show hosts Oprah Winfrey and Conan O'Brien among its followers.

It's unclear how long the flaw existed and how many people took advantage of it.

A side effect of the fix was that for about an hour, Twitter users showed zero followers while the company fixed the problem.

People who exploited the bug got more than an ego boost from having famous people appear to be their fans.

For a time, those celebrities really did become their audience and received the tweets from people who had fraudulently added them as followers.

Twitter recommends that users who were fraudulently added as a follower to someone else's account should click 'unfollow' to take themselves off those lists.

The company emphasised that updates on accounts set with privacy restrictions weren't made public because of the bug.

Information on such 'protected' accounts is hidden from public view, unless the account owner approves specific people to view updates.

- AP, NZ HERALD ONLINE