Wednesday, February 1, 2012

A Spam Tweet That'll Crash Twitter App

I saw something I have never seen before today. No, it's not unusual to get "@ replies" from Spambots after I've been retweeted or mentioned something like Yoga, Women or iPhone on Twitter - I've seen that a thousand times. (as an aside, how does Twitter not auto-recognize an account that has no followers and only sends @replies not as spam?)

But, today after I tweeted about my support for Planned Parenthood in the midst of the Susan G. Komen foundation dropping funding for mammograms and breast exams at Planned Parenthood - I was retweeted.

I then got a bunch of spam followers and a few spammy @replies. As per usual, I clicked on the tweets, selected the various user names and reported them as spam.

But that didn't work for one tweet. It looked like this on my Twitter App on my iPhone:
Twitter spam

Every time I clicked on it, the app crashed. When I looked at it on my desktop computer, it looked like this:

Screen shot 2012-02-01 at 7.12.04 PM

Not the first time I've seen this type of tomfoolery on the Internet, but the first time I've seen a tweet that will crash the twitter app.