Sphinx

One assumes that it’s something to do with the imminence of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Remortgage Wednesday and the rest of the run-up to Christmas, but in the last week or so a couple of very strange accounts have appeared on the Twitter. One (“Towoti Group”) has a profile picture of Ryan Gosling, the other (which has now disappeared completely ) had picture of Jake Gyllenhaal, and they tweet punctiliously every fifteen minutes, on a regular cycle of advert, advert, Thucydides quote, advert, advert, Thucydides quote. The quote is always “The secret of happiness is freedom… the secret of freedom is courage”; the adverts are mostly for women’s clothing, with the occasional LED illuminated bracelet, Christmas elf costume for your dog or cat, 90% human hair hairdressing training mannequin head, and so forth. I have questions…

Most of the questions are pretty easy to answer. Yes, of course they’re bots. No, it’s unlikely in the extreme that this is a successful way of drumming up business – the only people following these accounts are pretty clearly bots themselves. My best guess is that this is scamming the businesses, selling them a promise of social media advertising and engagement via motivational quotations (or rather quotation). It’s a cheaper version of junk mail – maybe someone will glance at it en route to the paper recycling, maybe some proportion of the people who do that will follow it up.

No, the real question is whether there are other such accounts, tweeting different quotations to reach different demographics. Thucydides doesn’t have any obvious connection to what’s being advertised, but you might imagine that it’s tailored to reach a certain audience; so, are the same goods being promoted by other accounts, with different profile pictures and quotes? Or, if Thucydides really is the key influencer in this field, when can we expect the breakthrough into mainstream media or the invitation to the next series of Strictly..?