How Gizmodo Broke Twitter

In the early afternoon of May 10^th, technology superblog Gizmodo posted a "Twitter hack" allowing you to FORCE other people to follow you. Would-be hackers who saw the post quickly started applying the (shockingly simple) formula offered on Gizmodo, and cranking up their follower lists. Twitter responded swiftly by correcting the bug, but caused a huge ripple in the Twitterverse in the process. While the "force follow" fix was being addressed, Twitter users saw their following and follower lists drop to 0 - leaving many to wonder if the social networking platform had broken.

All it took for this hack to work was a single line of text. You'd have to know the Twitter account name of the person/entity you wanted to follow you, which was no problem since that name is public. In the Twitter web client, just typing in "accept (account name)" and hitting enter made it possible to be followed by anyone you wanted. Typing in "follow (account name)" also worked, and the original post at Gizmodo suggested these features may have been old Twitter "features" (read: loopholes) that were forgotten and never addressed. The hack is reported to have only worked in the Twitter web client itself, and not in the many 3^rd party Twitter clients (such as TweetDeck and HootSuite) that Twitter users post updates from.

This trick must have been relatively unknown or recently discovered, considering many prominent accounts have precious few followers. Comedian and former Late Show host Conan O'Brien decided to follow a single, random person on his Twitter account - a woman named Sarah Killen. This story got some significant notice back in March, when Conan had about half a million followers - and that number has since doubled. As of this writing, Conan was following nearly a hundred people, despite an update he posted on May 8^th proclaiming: "If it ever says I'm following more than one person, I've been hacked. I'm a completely monogamous Twitterer-I only follow Sarah Killen." Other celebrities on Twitter follow very few, in contrast to the tens of thousands of followers listed on their accounts.

Even non-celebrities often opt to follow no one, or very few people to make those follows seem more important. An example of this is one of Twitter's pop culture phenomenons, a 29-year-old named Justin who posts his dad's funny quips to Twitter under an account known as "Sh*tMyDadSays". Justin's explosive popularity on Twitter has caused him to release a book of his dad's quotes, yet he follows only one Twitter account. Justin's sole follow is actor LeVar Burton, best known for his work on Reading Rainbow and as Geordi LaForge on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Conan O'Brien and other celebrity Twitter accounts were inundated with thousands of forced follows before Twitter intervened. Though the loophole has been repaired to avoid future forced follows, Twitter has not removed recent follows from any accounts as yet. Any forced follows are likely still active, or are in the process of being removed by accountholders. If you use Twitter, check to see who you're following - the accounts you've added most recently will be listed first.

Sources:

John Hermann. "How to Force Anyone to Follow You on Twitter - Twitter hack." Gizmodo.

"Conan Finally Follows Someone On Twitter: A Random Woman Who Likes Peanut Butter." TechCrunch.

Conan O'Brien. Twitter.

Justin. Twitter.