18 February 2013

Spam and the human brochure

| johnboy
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AdelaideNow has the story on the #humanbrochure hashtag spam.

As part of its world first “Human Brochure” campaign, Australian Capital Tourism gave away hundreds of free weekend trips to the nation’s capital this month in return for promotion on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram using the hashtag #humanbrochure.

However as winners happily tweeted photos and praise-filled reviews of their free hotel suites, museum excursions and dinners over the weekend, canny internet spammers began flooding the feed with their own promotions, including links to porn sites.

Adding to the problem was the fact much of the spam read like plausible tourism tweets, offering web links with messages like “This made me laugh so hard #humanbrochure”.

You can see a spam free edited selection of tweets on their website.

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Holden Caulfield12:28 pm 18 Feb 13

This is news? Any hashtag that generates impact gets spammed all the time. Any intermediate user of twitter should be able to spot the wheat from the chaff without too much bother.

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