During the past few months, we have noticed a couple of bugs/issues with the popular real-time micro-blogging platform, Twitter. You can learn how to post a tweet longer than 140 characters, or how Twitter has been losing users’ tweets during the past few weeks. Today, I noticed a new bug – I’m not the first to do so, but it’s still worth talking about - it’s the block/unblock bug.
There is a new Twitter “gambling” game called Bet Your Followers that exploits this bug. Their elevator pitch is that “Bet Your Followers is a Twitter game that lets you gamble your followers as currency“, and the block/unblock bug is one of the reasons this game was possible to create in the first place. The part where they force users to follow you if you “win” still puzzles me, though – if it works of course.
What is it & how to do it?
Twitter's Block-Unblock Bug
I have a few annoying followers that I keep filtering out every time I try following back all those who follow me. So every time around, I have to keep an eye out for those users and make sure I do not follow them back by mistake. At the same time, I do not want to negatively affect these users’ accounts by blocking them indefinitely. At the end of the day, this maybe how Twitter determines and terminates spam accounts. The Twitter issue I’m referring to as the Block/Unblock bug simply eliminates this problem by forcing this follower to unfollow you without the need to hack their account to unfollow yourself ;). This is done by simply blocking and unblocking the user.
To do it yourself, just do the following:
- Go to the Twitter profile page of the user that you’d like to force to unfollow you. This should be like http://twitter.com/annoyinguser
- Locate the “block @annoyinguser” link and hit it. Now neither you nor @annoyinguser follow one another.
- Unblock him now using the same link on his profile page – unless he’s a spammer of course!
- That’s it – his “following” count just dropped one!
Final thoughts…
It’s not the first time I hear about bugs, security issues and unexpected downtime of platforms around the Web. So, should we trust Twitter and Facebook (…etc) with our data and the protection of our privacy? Is it a mistake?
