Twitter Follow Bot

A violation of Twitter's API use policy

January 2014

I was once a big Twitter user, trying to get popular for being funny. Of course, that meant I wanted a following. And what better way to get that than to use my newfound programming skills than to trick people into following me.

This was my first time using the Twitter API, and any API for that matter. I wrote a program and ran it on an old computer at home all day while I was at school. I’d enter a celebrity account, then from their list of followers, I would follow and then later unfollow them, in hopes of them following me back.

It worked somewhat well, and after a while I got up to 1000 unearned followers. But Twitter shut it down.

Later, I’d improve the program, in hopes of minimizing API abuse, but it was still pretty ineffective.