Home @Jesus Has Forsaken Me, But I Still Have Fake @SteveJobs

@Jesus Has Forsaken Me, But I Still Have Fake @SteveJobs

I went to bed last night and noticed my inbox was overflowing with notices from Twitter that I had new followers – 71 new followers to be exact. By the time I woke up yesterday morning there were 21 more. Today, there are even more. I was confused at first, but then I realized what it must be – that fake Steve Jobs Twitter account I made follow me using the “accept @username” bug on Monday.

If you weren’t around on Monday and closely paying attention to the tech world, then you might have missed it. There was a bug on Twitter that allowed any user to simply tweet “accept @username” and that person would automatically begin following you. It was a blast. People ran around getting whoever they could think of, from President Barack Obama to Bill Gates to Conan O’Brien, to follow them.

The bug was that an SMS code, normally used by those with private accounts to accept new followers using their phone, had this unexpected force-follow functionality. It had been originally found in Turkey days earlier by a 17-year-old named Bora Kirca but didn’t make it to the mainstream until Monday morning.

Once Twitter got wind of the situation, they began working on the bug. At one point, everyone’s follower/following count was reset to zero, the Twitter-verse went crazy, and then it all seemed to go back to normal. We watched as one celebrity after another unfollowed us and their following numbers slowly dropped back to pre-bug levels. But that’s all we were really paying attention to – the big celebrities we had followed.

Twitter’s last update on the cleanup said that it had finished its cleanup and the rest was up to you:

We’ve finished our cleanup of the spurious followings generated a result of this bug. If you are still seeing folks you are following who you didn’t choose to follow, please use the block or unfollow tools to remedy.

According to Twitter spokesperson Sean Garrett, the fix was a “programmatic rollbak where we had a high-level of certainty of forced follows.”

“Since users can manually unfollow, we erred on the side of not dissolving ‘real’ relationships. The reality is that verified users had the bulk of the rollbacks but certainly not all,” explained Garrett. “Regardless of how we fixed the situation, this obviously never should have happened in the first place, and we are working hard to make sure that this type of thing doesn’t happen again.”

So if you’re finding that there’s this crazy spam Twitter account that you’re now following that’s clogging up your client, you might not be crazy – Twitter might have missed it. For me, though, it looks like me and good old fake Steve Jobs are pals and I’ll continue to reap the follows of people who think I’m important enough to be one of six people the real Steve Jobs would follow.

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