MY TWITTER CRUSH DIED. HASHTAG SAD FACE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

I'll get to the FUCK ME messages later.
   In my experience, Twitter hasn’t been the place for fraudulent hijinks. Except that one time. I gained a follower who was hard to pin down. This person changed Twitter description and the visuals quite often. I’d see a comment from WORLD HATES MICE and the @TWITTERCRUSH part of the name stayed the same…next to a different image. 

   Who is this? MURDER FRIED DOLPHINS @TWITTERCRUSH (image of strawberries) came in and made a comment. What sort of comment? Oh, dropping into a self-created conversation in mid-flow and wondering what I thought of the matter.

   Being American, and aiming at politics, @TWITTERCRUSH made references to politicians down at county level, and I cared not. Later, finally noticing this Space Cadet (wired to the back end of the moon), I made a point of checking out the main feed.

   I hesitate to describe the account as belonging to the OLD MAN RANTS AT CLOUD school of public discourse, but I don’t hesitate long.

   Easy choice. I dismissed this wave of negativity. No, I didn’t bother unfollowing…I just turned and did something else with my life. (Which I suspect involved coffee.)

*

Then, one night, a funny thing happened on the way to the Twitter. I received a Direct Message. If you haven’t experienced the Direct Message on Twitter, it’s as useful as a fart in a spacesuit. At least it tells you that your sense of smell is working.

   Regular Tweeps send me Direct Messages of worth. These are rare birds.

   This message was from a semi-random individual with a familiar picture up…and a name I vaguely recalled. We’ll say this was a woman. We are all cats on the internet.

   This woman said hello, and apologised for using a second account…as…gasp, shock, horror…her first account was hacked. I ran checks on both accounts. There they were. Same photo. This meant nothing.

   She was planning a trip to the big city, and her idea was to meet @TWITTERCRUSH. I seemed to have some involvement with the @TWITTERCRUSH account…

   (A lie was told there, surely.)

   On that flimsy basis, was this big city person trustworthy?

   From across the school playground, using the power of Twitter, someone played out a game of MY MATE FANCIES YOUR MATE. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT?

   I think the catfish lurks on the bottom of the pond, waiting to strike.

   Scam e-mail is a thing. Those African Princes don’t fund themselves, y’know. Being from accounts almost exclusively in France, I suspect more than a few African Princes of not being African at all. This is a theme we’ll return to very quickly.

   I’ve only had this one Direct Message in Twitter playing that game. I decided not to play. Instead, I made my excuses and left, reeling off a witty comment about @TWITTERCRUSH and “her” identity. If a man, he was a very lucky man based on his past. How so?

   On regular Twitter posts, @TWITTERCRUSH commented about going to a school that I checked for authenticity…it was an all-girl school with a mostly-black student population. By that, we’re talking 99% of the school.

   On normal Twitter, I knew something was deeply twisted about @TWITTERCRUSH once I noticed the character, so I was running background checks even before I needed to run background checks.

   You always need to run those before you need to. There’s no such thing as normal Twitter.

   Catfish swam away, with a laugh, finding me witty and entertaining. I didn’t bite. But I did look long and hard at @TWITTERCRUSH and associates.

   A world of negativity over there. I did some fishing of my own. One night, I decided on a very public Twitter cull. I started calling out certain types of account as I zapped them one by one. No fucks given, slash and burn, slice and dice, eat shit and die, fuckers.

   The usual suspects.

   I reached for ManageFlitter, and called up the inactive accounts.

   Here’s a media consultant who started the account a year ago. Ten Tweets in all that time. I remembered following media consultant when the account opened. Nothing since then. Zap. Bye. And so on.

   Amazon Best-selling author. I once gained that title and know exactly what it takes to earn the pointless trophy, meaning…I am not impressed. Goodbye, best-selling advertiser.

   Twitter expert. Following fifteen people. Followers 20,000. Hasn’t Tweeted in a month. No loss there. KAPOW.

   I don’t follow these accounts now, so how did they appear then? Overnight an otherwise okay account can add best-selling author to the bio, or during Happy Hour the media pundit slashes the following to immediate family and pets, reducing admin.

   Gone fishin’. I waited to see if @TWITTERCRUSH took the bait. In went the worm, wriggling…I sent the Tweet out…

   Here’s one. Ah. Twitter crush. Gets a pass. But for how long? One Tweet will save that account.

*

Without naming the account, I moved on and zapped accounts with no profile picture, accounts with no biography, and accounts that were clearly dead. I’m choosy, these days. Though I was choosy, back then.

   My Twitter feed is full of hashtagged coffee Tweets and references to STAR WARS and random stuff. I rarely Tweet my own books out there. I’ve taken to cutting ultra-heavy self-promoting authors as I go along. But, yes, I was still choosy, before.
   Well…

   It wasn’t long before @TWITTERCRUSH snapped at the bait. “She” checked in, and wondered if “she” should Tweet more often to avoid my cull. Joke. This motherfucker did nothing but Tweet, so was safe from my cull.

   Wrong.

   I gave it a week, and started force-unfollowing the scabby accounts around the crush. Hangers-on and like-minded bottom-feeders. Bit by bit, I dismantled a poisonous network built into this Space Cadet’s Twitter activity. No ties to me, as I severed the tentacles. There was one genuine account, and I let that stay.

   Then it was time to remove the offender “herself” – which I did without difficulty. This was a weapons-grade troll, and my gradual actions played out as defusing a bomb. I had no more contact with the crush after that.

   Except, of course, through that one genuine person who was tied to the old network. Years later, seeing a Tweet on that feed, I noticed the @TWITTERCRUSH account still going, but not at the same fast-paced rush.

   The account posted a picture of a black woman and…

   No, come off it, that’s not true.

   The account posted a picture of an old white guy, finally emerging from that all-girl school with a sex-change and quite the palest skin I’ve ever seen on an African-American. Maybe it was the filter on that photo. You know the one. The bullshit one.

   Yes. @TWITTERCRUSH was severely ill, and the account turned robotic. My Twitter crush died. Hashtag sad face.

   This prompted me to check my Twitter settings. Over the length of my Twitter journey, I’ve blocked 30 accounts. They were all fake spam accounts that sprang up for a short irritating period before Twitter clamped down on the wriggly pus-filled worms.

   That’s why there weren’t many of them. And they didn’t show up immediately. Took a wee while for the bots to crawl out of their vats.

   I’ve never blocked an actual person. Bots, yes. No, I’ve never retired a human by mistake.

*

Why tell this story? I tell stories.

   People tell me their stories about the Direct Message. Those stories involve women and dick pics and pumpkins, oh my! There are hacked accounts, obvious fake identities, backstage author-bashing from authors who never knew better but should know now. (Though they never will.)

   I don’t get any of that. Yes, I mean I don’t receive any of that and I don’t get any of it, either. Meanwhile, in fraudulent e-mail land, I am offered banking upgrades I suspect are financial downgrades.

   My PayPal account has been suspended so many times they went and outlawed hanging. I don’t think I’ll ever get back inside my non-existent Bank of Ireland account. Damn it. How else am I to liberate Sani Abacha’s missing millions?

   I could e-mail strangers for help with the processing fees. Wait, what’s this? An invitation to explore the depths of Lake Toplitz? The only gold to be made out of that scheme is by renting diving equipment to explorers. And as the government keeps a lid on that activity, there’s precious little gold in them thar depths.

*

So a funny thing happened on the way to this blog post. I had these stats at my fingertips, showing dead accounts. However, I ignored one category - the influential.

   Inactive accounts were easy to spot, right?

   Wrong. There were "influential" accounts that only Tweeted robotically, to avoid being flagged as inactive. That did it. I took a flamethrower to my Twitter and burned...

   The sly fuckers with multiple near-identical Twitter accounts, who followed me at much-delayed intervals...

   Non-bio accounts that had a biography once, long-ago.

   All of those active accounts that generated best-seller status long after the fact...

   Accounts that were accounts on behalf of other accounts...

   Strange accounts that were protected for no discernible reason...

   Advertising accounts pretending to be people...

   Bundled accounts that were all part of the same business...

   And many variations on a theme.

   Flame on.

   I killed a lot of advertisers, about three serial killers, and enough best-sellers to stock a fucking library of trashy airport novels.

   They fell before me like ripe grain before the reaper's scythe. On into the Valley of Unfollow rode the 600. I've never had a massive Twitter audience. That's thanks to aiming for a bit of quality rather than quantity.

   I may fell more Twitter trees by year's end. Or by day's end. Depends on my mood. Hashtag scythe.

*

And the FUCK ME messages?
   Unfeasibly pneumatic breasts surgically attached to women are now popping up on my screen, thanks to Google fucking Chrome, coinciding with e-mails from similarly-endowed boob robots.
   I put this down to my YouTube channel. Starting that up, I opened another e-mail avenue to the data-skimming automatons out there in the cloud.
   It took a while to notice, as the e-mail is bumped to the rubbish. And my screen doesn't register anything on the right edge - the on-screen notifications are somewhere inside the right border of the TV, where the plastic frame lies.
   Some accounts, useful ones, official ones, are kicked to the rubbish by my e-mail settings. For this reason, I rake through the leaves looking for gold...
   And find the FUCK ME e-mails. I suspect the pop-out pop-ups are in a different resolution now, so a right boob squeezes onto the interface from time to time. Always in lycra. I suspect that's what the boob is made from, too.