Kirtsy, a ‘digg for chicks’ recently (and still does) have a problem with users submitting porn sites. Sunday, a Twitter account @kirtsynews created quite a stir after it posted some very sexual updates, not aligned with the brand or userbase. Users complained, and blamed twitter for letting ‘brand hijacking’ happen, demanding that the account be suspended. A fan of the site created the account, growing the following to over 4000 users.
The only problem? The links of the account were directly from the Kirtsy RSS feed, and linked to the articles on the site. The only thing the account was guilty of was being exactly what the site was, user submitted links. In this case, a few adult industry website owners posted links to their site, and the bot published them.
So Kirtsy removes the porn, problem solved, right? No, in this digital lynchmob culture, users chose to place the blame on Twitter. The weird thing? It worked. Twitter removed the account for unspecified reasons. The account now reads “Sorry, the account you were headed to has been suspended due to strange activity.”
Yes, republishing an RSS feed is strange.
Couple this with the recent pulling of usernames and you must ask, do you just need a good story and a handful of friends to fake outrage to have a username pulled from twitter? Or would Twitter having a policy and sticking to it work?
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