At least, this is the impression I now have.
I’m a pretty anti-twitter-spam kinda guy. One of my favorite things about Tweetdeck is the block & report spam by DM function. I’m also the guy who will let you know if your e-mail or tweets look like you might have been hacked. (I’ve also been right, more than once.)
What does my twitter-spam look like? Usually it’s porn spam or writing related. Usually I’ll check the person’s profile, just to make sure it’s not a fluke. The really obvious ones have pages of posts all with the same text. Some of the more sophisticated ones space out the spam tweets so it’s not obvious.
Remember: The best way to fight spam on a social network is to report it.
So I happened to see two tweets come through @Jeremy_Morrison‘s account that promoted porn webcams. Strange enough. Then I looked at his Twitter page, and saw that suddenly there were a lot more retweets…including several porn retweets (go look for the porn retweets yourself)… right after he complained about having problems with Tweetdeck.
Which made me think that maybe he’d been hacked. So I let him know.
Turns out I was wrong – he knows the people making the porn. Fair enough. I let him know why I thought he might have been hacked, and said it was cool that he wasn’t.
But then he (jokingly?) asked if I was stalking him.1
Look, folks, if your profile is public, anybody can see it. (Wow, Steve, you posted three entries today! Feeling sporkstabby?) If you suddenly start posting out-of-character stuff on ANY social network, people are going to think you’ve been hacked, especially when it’s ads for porn.
And when someone asks if you’ve been hacked – even if they’re wrong – that doesn’t mean they’re stalking you. Last weekend I passed along a resource to a group of authors. The url was kind of funny looking, so a few of them asked me if I’d been hacked (or if I sent it).
That’s being a good person.
Maybe I’m just cranky tonight. I’m taking a nap.
1 If you’re really interested, a screencap of the whole conversation (created by https://www.tweetconvo.com/) is here.