This strikes me as typical silicon valley gossip news—ultimately worthless except to drive people to news aggregators and the offending sites. I even went on twitter for the first time in a month!
Oh, I get it now. Putting putting words in people's virtual mouths without their permission or knowledge, then using it for advertising purposes, isn't such a good idea after all.
Thinking they are legitimate is the DEFAULT expectation.
The only way for them to not claim they are legitimate tweets is to actually state, visibly, that they are NOT legitimate.
And that's without even taking into account that they used REAL account names.
>Who is getting fooled here and at what harm?
Who the fuck told Twitter that I, as a user, want my REAL ACCOUNT HANDLE, advertising stuff I don't know about?
Maybe for someone who has never viewed an ad before (which almost entirely exist in hypothetical universes, aka fictional), but it's clearly marketing speak and not someone's actual writing.
My default expectation for user-generated content in a commercial or advertisement is that it is made-up.
Not if you're looking at a mockup in an ad. Quite the opposite, actually.
I'm mostly pissed off because the laws against using likeness/pictures/etc. to promote products without model sign off get in my way myself all the time, so seeing Twitter break the laws I have to follow is very annoying.
Did that come across with the implied sarcastic tone I'm trying to convey? Because I have a solution to your problems - don't use twitter. It's really not as outlandish as you think.
No matter if the service is otherwise needed (e.g you are a company and you need a twitter account as part of your reach strategy) or what they did was actually against the law and your rights.
Heck, why didn't that Rosa Parks girl just quit using the bus services, instead of causing such a stir?
(And, no, it didn't come out as sarcastic. Mostly as inane and bend-over-ish).
I'll bet you say a lot of trivial things are as bad as Hitler too.
Also, stopping the use of a service is pretty much the exact opposite of just "taking it".
I appreciate your input.
A few lines down there is an adblock with 8 stories, 4 of which have faces of celebrities.
They may actually be violating something there.
Unrelated, but one of my first jobs was for an online merchant that used very underhanded methods. They would do ad buys on Yahoo and then setup mod_rewrite rules that would show different ads to anyone from a Yahoo subnet. Therefore the ad rep would approve the ad buy, but actual users ended up seeing completely different content. Very, very seedy.
This was also my shortest job ever, and I was not offended when the owner threatened to sue me if I stole the "company secrets". Hah!
It probably even would have been easier than selecting the real names that they wanted to use.
2) The venturebeat article doesn't add anything over what appears to be the original article (http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2013/07/23/twitter-fakes-re...).
