Tweets to Promote Ad Platform

What if one of the most powerful media companies in the world made words come out of its customers’ mouths to promote its new ad platform?Twitter posted on its blog today about a new, wider release of an integration the company is doing with TV commercials. In the blog post is a shot of a new Twitter ads dashboard showing tweets from Twitter users raving about TV commercials.

The tweets look completely real, but SFGate discovered that while the Twitter users who are featured are real, their tweets are not. The users featured raving about TV commercials never said anything of the kind, and were unaware their profile pics and accounts were being presented in a post on Twitter’s blog sent out to hundreds of thousands via the @Twitterads Twitter account and retweeted to more than 1.5 million.