# What are these twitter accounts doing?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-twitter-accounts-doing/623268
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [May 27, 2012, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-twitter-accounts-doing/623268 "2012-05-27T19:25:48Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Reyemile](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reyemile)
#### Post date: [May 27, 2012, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-twitter-accounts-doing/623268/1 "2012-05-27T19:25:48Z")
I work for the Social Media department of a test-prep company. For the past two weeks, I keep seeing the following tweet:
> [@](#):
>
> Time to get back to my gmat early morning and late night studying routine… blah
This is NOT a retweet; it’s just twitter accounts (often named just strings of random numbers or letters) posting the exact same message under their own names.
What do they hope to accomplish by doing this? Are they spamming for spamming sake? Or are they planning to poach followers from the original poster of that message, then switch to spamming ads? Or what?
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### Author:  [@Larry\_Mudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Mudd)
#### Post date: [May 27, 2012, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-twitter-accounts-doing/623268/2 "2012-05-27T19:55:19Z")
Looking at an [example](https://es.twitter.com/#!/agnesjamesqj/following), it looks like an account set up to follow promotional accounts in order to pad their numbers.
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### Author:  [@tellyworth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tellyworth)
#### Post date: [May 27, 2012, 10:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-these-twitter-accounts-doing/623268/3 "2012-05-27T22:37:30Z")
I agree, it’s likely these were set up by “buy followers” style spammers. They use tweets or quotes copied from various sources in order to make accounts look legit and sneak past Twitter’s spam hunters (who are very good).