Latest Twitter Raid: Blame it on 4chan?

Social networking behemoth and award winning social site Twitter got their hands full last Sunday, July 5, 2009, when a large attack consisting of fake accounts barged into the site all at once. These fake accounts allegedly pushed through their own versions of NSFW or widely known as "Not Safe For Work" viral topics consisting of the infamous "#gorillapenis" trending spam, thus making it the hot trend for that day all throughout Twitter.com. Twitter then immediately pushed through in banning massive spam accounts all at once, including the innocent ones.

Prior to the attack, reports and certain blogosphere sources already claimed that popular images forums and community board 4chan and other sites of same nature has been planning and orchestrating the attack. 4chan.com has been famous throughout the internet, as a culture craze and internet meme hub for the webaholics, has been branded as the raid culture of its kind with track records of various raids on popular sites including the recently just finished YouTube Porn Day, where avalanches of porn comments and videos were posted by fake accounts. 4chan community were also to blame for Time Magazine's vote for the World's Most Influential Person campaign and pushing 4chan site creator "MOOT" as the landslide winner.

The Twitter raid, named "Operation Shitter" in the boiler rooms of the 4chan forums, even has an instruction that comes with an image to boot to simplify the process. Everyone in the Twitter side of the coin are trying to blame Ebaum's World, another famous social networking site and widely known as hated to the pulp by 4chan Anons (anonymous). But after the smoke cleared, everyone started to think twice because it has been a long tradition of 4chan Anons to put the blame on Ebaum's World every time they put up a raid.

What is more disturbing is that the distribution of the scripts and small programs that would help spam Twitter can be easily found on 4chan's affiliated wikis and links are shared accordingly to 4chan community. The plot thickens when the wikis themselves have information and how to's just to systematically game the system of Twitter.

If one can remember, a lot of NSFW incidents were put up across the internet's famous social media sites every time someone famous passed away, for instance the case of Mollie Sugden and lately Michael Jackson.

The incident last Sunday forced Twitter to implement stricter measures to verify identities of users. The social network now imposes phone verification for celebrity profiles in the hopes of stopping posers.

The Twit war between Will.I.am and Perez Hilton a few weeks back has also been a Twitter sensation. With the breach of different media like cell phones, TV, print and radio, Twitter has to step up in combating these juvenile and destructive behaviors of competing and over jealous sites in the near future to take their claim of being the top social network to date seriously. This also brings up the question "Will Google now make its move in wooing Twitter again into a buy out?"

Sources:

http://www.buzzup.com/us/story.php?title=Twitter-under-siege-by-4chan

http://questechie.blogspot.com/2009/07/raid-on-twitter-traced-to-board-4chan.html

Credit: Insurgency Wiki