Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

Twitter can be dangerous. Everyone who has seen “Bambi,” the movie, should know this.

True, the song didn’t make it into the studio release (in 1942), which is a shame, but the dialogue did. That’s when the term “twitterpated” was coined.

The conversation is among Friend Owl, Bambi, Thumper the rabbit and Flower the skunk. They notice that some of the other animals are acting goofy, and Friend Owl explains that nearly everyone gets twitterpated in the spring.

It used to be slang for being obsessed , or nervously excited, or infatuated. But now it may mean having Twitter on the brain. And this can lead to risk-taking behavior.

You can’t prove it by me, because I don’t follow many and am followed by few, on Twitter, but apparently many other users want to have numerous followers and are busy following numerous others.

A Twitter user’s followers do not need to be otherwise acquainted with that user, and the user follows others he/she does not know in any other way.

Famous folks (and groups and brands) have thousands, millions, tens of millions of followers, and send them tweets frequently. Those mass tweets are followed by news media, and tweets are quoted in print and broadcasts.

Then there are those who tweet nearly their every thought, and every thoughtless banality that crosses their minds and engages their thumbs. Their hope is to have their tweets received by a great number of followers.

But how are these non-celebs to acquire vast followings?

Turns out Twitter and Instagram followers, and Facebook likes, can be bought. Barracuda Labs reports that Twitter followers can be bought for $18 per 1,000, much less than the going price a while ago.

For the more straightforward pursuit of Twitter linkage there is the social network’s built-in function called TweetDeck. Wouldn’t you know it, that is being exploited by hijackers after users’ IDs and access to users under false colors.

Thought to be based in Turkey, these online brigands have registered many sites and promoted them through Twitter Trends.

From one of their sites, a scammer will ask a Twitter user for his username, and promise either 20 new followers free, or, for a fee for “premium” account status and sized for the appropriate “level,” hundreds or even thousands of new followers every day for five days.

Whee! Talk about obsession! What a thrill, having anywhere from 20 to 25,000 new followers to tweet to—most or all of them strangers. And imagine how hard-up those users must be for some kind of acknowledgment, probably passive, from unknowns!

Silly but harmless, we might think. Just one more indication that some people have too little to do. But it turns out that with that TweetDeck ID from each user signed up, the scammers were enabled to exploit the Twitter OAuth standard coded into the application programming interface. This allows scammers to grab tokens that approve TweetDeck access by individual users, without passworded permission.

Using these ill-gotten authorizations, the scammers redirect access tokens to their own servers. Twitter clients are handed off to follower bots. Also, scammers can follow and tweet as the exploited users, and access their private messages and info.

Twitter is trying to reduce the vulnerability. It has put a two-factor authentication method in place, and has been spreading the word about how to use TweetDeck safely.

Bitdefender recommends that victims of these scams uninstall and reinstall TweetDeck then scan for malware. This should be done on any device from which the user logs in to Twitter.

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Do you get the impression that some people just decide to hate, for no particular reason but based on some prejudice, and then seize upon whatever pretext they can find in order to justify the hatred? And they spread their “gospel” far and wide, seeming to assume others share their hateful, unreasoning impulses? And they dress up their hateful inclinations in religion and patriotism?

And have you noticed that a whole swat of such people are on Facebook and Twitter and other social networks, and do an enormous amount of mass email forwarding, enough so that hate “chain mail” has brought down servers, what with its multiplier effect and the ginormous size of each message, full of graphics, animations and multiple fonts and colors?

Scrolling down a Facebook page of some such users I see more hateful, and mindless, stuff posted about one particular target, or pair, than I could have imagined. Over and over something has been posted that has been known to be false, maybe for years. For example, one gem came up again, probably in connection with Memorial Day. It is so easy to find out, concerning most such hate-mongering stuff, whether it is valid, a lie from top to bottom and front to back and side to side or just a distortion. It must be that those who post and email it prefer not to know the truth!

It is still true that the photo purporting to show the President’s wife not saluting the flag when she should was deliberately faked, Photoshopped, and sent forth in the spirit of blind hatred. It was true in 2012, and has been ever since, that this is deception. Haters would rather be deceived by other haters than told the truth by anyone, apparently.

There is POTUS with his hand over his heart, and there is FLOTUS with her arms across her tummy, right behind him. Not mentioned by the haters is that no one else in the photo has a hand on his or her chest! Be aware that this was at an NCAA basketball game aboard an aircraft carrier and the colors were being retired, and POTUS made the spontaneous gesture honoring the flag before anyone else had reacted. The image has been cropped and spliced. A genuine AP photo taken on the same occasion shows the couple and others all honoring the flag.

I’d love to send this truthful message to everyone I know and tell all of them to do the same, but this medium does not enable that. Besides, Truth seems to be less interesting, especially to haters.