The Story Behind Twitter’s ‘Accept’ Bug
Gizmodo has the story behind the strange little episode that took place today on Twitter, in which an incredibly simple trick was discovered that allowed anyone to force anyone else to follow their accounts: The Real Story Behind Twitter’s Ridiculous Follow Bug.
It’s pretty surprising (to say the least) for a bug like this to have existed without anyone encountering it before, with millions of users hammering away at the system every day for years. In fact, it’s possible that others have stumbled across it but never even knew.
The bug was discovered by accident, by a Turkish Twitter user. Here’s what happened.
Our initial tip came to us through another Turkish Twitter user, named Güntekin. His first message to us, which frankly sounded ridiculous (Preemptive [sic]:
A Turkish guy named Bora Kırca figared out accidently that if you tweet “accept username”, for example billgates, then bill gates will follow you.
it’s so stupid; but true.
Stupid, but yeah, true. It worked. We posted about it. Twitter went nuts, everyone’s follow numbers shot to zero, and Bora’s Twitter account was suspended. But how did he find this thing in the first place? Accidentally? Really? Güntekin explains:
[Bora] likes a group named “Accept” and to show his love, he tweets “accept pwnz”; but instead of seeing this post, he sees twitter user “pwnz” follows him.
He told his girlfriend, and together they started doing exactly what anyone else would have: They made famous people follow them. Then he posted about it on his blog, here, in Turkish.
Frank says: