On Wednesday, I wrote about Twitter users having a botnet post gibberish in the replies of a tweet to artificially boost its engagement. I wrote that I assumed the tweet was targeted by bots to make it appear more prominently in Twitter’s trending content widgets. But a few readers messaged me to say it’s actually a bit more complicated than that.
I was told me that what was actually happening is that users are posting things like “logo for my business” to attract the attention of bots that would then boost the engagement of the thread.
So I tried it out as an experiment, I tweeted that I needed a logo for my business. I received a BUNCH of replies and because I have open DMs, a bunch of messages, as well. I actually messaged one of the “bots” back and discovered they weren’t a bot at all, actually.
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What actually may have happened was users wanted to boost the visibility of a tweet, so they filled up the replies with requests for a “logo” or “essay,” which then pinged thousands of anonymous freelancers looking for work, who then replied to these requests, thus boosting the tweet’s placement in Twitter’s trending algorithm.
