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Wow, this works. SnoopDogg is now following me: http://twitter.com/snoopdogg. I'm the cartoon figure.

Bad plan to try this out with an account you value - if they can identify who has used the exploit they will probably ban you when the dust settles.

Is it an exploit or is it a valid command? I don't think we hacked anything, we just typed in some text that causes people to follow us, for all we know that's a new feature of twitter.

Unfortunately, they can probably do whatever they want with this, whether people think it's fair or not.

No matter what twitter planned for it, it's an exploit. Users think that only they can control who follows them, but this feature gets around that.

Sounds like a backdoor that someone forgot, or was too lazy to remove.

I highly doubt that. From what I'm reading on the Intarwebs, a LOT of people just couldn't resist playing with this exploit. If they truly banned everyone who did a force-follow with this hack I think they would lose a ton of people who are frankly only getting marginal value from Twitter.

I know that if I actually had to rebuild my followee list for "testing" this little hack out I would probably decide it wasn't worth the effort to start over again on Twitter.

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