A recent discovery concerning a bug in Twitter that will allow one user to force the account of another user of Twitter to “Follow” them on the service has been the subject of much discussion, though the flaw was repaired on Monday. Normally, one of the people on the other end of a Twitter “Follow” request will have to initiate the following process. Twitter was unable to say how long this flaw had existed on the service, nor how many people had been able to take advantage of it.

 

It was easy to get the flaw to appear. All a user had to do was send a tweet in this format: “accept [Twitter Username]”. Anyone who knew the Twitter username of a celebrity could promptly add them to their list of Followers, making it look as if the famous person had actually asked to follow them.

 

Twitter also told users who had been affected by the flaw to simply “Unfollow” anyone who appeared on their lists that they did not recognize. Many users who had set their Facebook accounts with Privacy Restrictions in place were worried that their account updates could have been made public instead of private, but Twitter was able to reassure these users that all was well.