Saturday, March 15, 2014

Who is Tom Bock, and Why Does He Keep Following Me?

So I have a doppelganger on Twitter. A twitterganger, if you will.

It started last week, when I was looking at Tweetdeck one evening. I saw a post with our district's tech hashtag #SDUHSDtech from one Tom Bock. Now, I've wanted to get teachers in our district using that hashtag for conversations, but so far I'm just about the only one who uses it. So it is a rarity when I see a post in that column that I didn't write. Furthermore, I don't know anyone named Tom Bock. I decided to click on their profile to see who it was. Here's what I saw:
The internal monologue in my head went something like this, as I read:
  • Teacher on Special Assignment: OK, cool, someone else who is a ToSA...
  • (Technology and Learning): What a coincidence, that's my title, too!
  • for the San Dieguito... WAIT A MINUTE! WHAT?
This account had copied my bio, but not my current bio. This is one from a few months ago, before I made some changes. It got stranger as I started investigating. Starting on February 28, this account re-posted my tweets nearly verbatim, 3 or 4 per day. I say "nearly" verbatim, because it stripped out the @ before Twitter usernames, so the people I had written to would not see these tweets. Here are some examples:






This was weird. There's nothing special about the tweets the account chose to re-post. I couldn't find any pattern. There's no distinguishing information in the account's profile. I tried a Google Image search on the profile picture but did not find a match, so I can't tell where the photo came from.

I presumed this was a "bot", not someone who was manually re-typing my posts. This was confirmed in my head after I started tweeting about the account itself:
Several of my Twitter friends recommended that I report the account for impersonation. One linked to Kathy Cassidy's blog post about her twitter imposter; I considered that my situation was not as bad as hers. After all, they didn't use my name, my photo, or my URL in their profile. On further consideration, though, I decided that it was impersonation. First of all, this account was representing itself as coming from my school district. I work hard to represent my district professionally on Twitter, and don't want someone else behaving inappropriately and having that reflect on my district. Secondly, I would like to think that I have a positive presence myself; I try to contribute as much to my PLN as I get from them. Some of the re-posts from "Tom Bock" got replies from people who follow me, and they followed "Tom Bock", in good faith. I don't want anyone to mislead my followers, especially with my own words. Third, there's the "annoying-little-brother-following-you-around-repeating-everything-you-say" factor. Finally, while 140-character tweets are not exactly grand treatises, plagiarism is plagiarism: dammit, I wrote those, and you stole them!

So I used Twitter's process for reporting an impersonating account. As part of that, I had to send in a picture of my driver's license to prove who I am. Since the account is not using my name, I also had to send in a picture of my district ID, to prove that I work for the district. It was a little bit of a pain, but not too bad.

However, Twitter does not agree with me:
According to Twitter, this behavior is perfectly fine. I can block "Tom Bock", but that won't prevent the bot from seeing and copying my tweets. Or I can protect my profile, which negates most of the benefit of having a PLN on a social media site.

That's where it stands now. As of today, "Tom Bock" hasn't posted anything since Tuesday. Maybe the bot got tired. Maybe it's just storing up my tweets. Or maybe whoever created the bot realized that I'm aware of what it's doing. (I did re-tweet once, on accident, using the accounts' twitter handle. I tried to avoid that, but slipped once. Maybe that's what it takes to get it to stop? Just guessing.)

I've spent some time trying to figure out why someone would do this, and the only thing I can come up with is that it is to build an account with seemingly real tweets that can then be sold to someone else. I've never understood the "Buy 10000 followers immediately" offers, but obviously some people do that. I suppose someone could charge more for "real" accounts with dozens of tweets rather than obviously newly-created accounts. But I'm just guessing.

This is a minor issue; an annoyance, nothing worse. But it has certainly made me think about how fragile our online reputations are. We teach our students about creating positive digital footprints (or digital tattoos), but much of it is out of our hands, unfortunately. And I think it gives me just a little bit more insight into people who are seriously stalked, harassed, or threatened on Twitter (or other networks) and feel like there's nothing they can do about it.

In any case, I think all we can do now is to block "TomBock3" and report the account for spam. If you haven't done that already, I would appreciate it.

P.S. I'm a child of the 80's, and one of my favorite bands from then is Timbuk3. If this were a real person named Tom Bock, and they used "Tombok3" as their Twitter handle, that would be genius!


UPDATE 3/16: Looks like I spoke too soon. "Tom Bock" copied six more of my tweets last night, so I guess the bot isn't finished. All six of the tweets were posted at 2:53 am. I'm using a new Twitter app on my Android tablet (Plume), and when I look at the followers of "Tom Bock", it shows the most recent tweet for them. Fully half of those "followers" also posted their most recent tweet at 2:53 am. How long is it before Twitter is nothing more than bots following other bots?
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