I wonder how many of the 3,836,220 followers Niall Horan of One Direction has on Twitter went and clicked the following link posted to his official feed a little earlier:
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“An amazing new weight loss product! It worked for me without dite changes!! [Spamlink removed]“
Maybe he could re-release “It wasn’t me” by Shaggy. While they rocket to the top of the charts with my suggestion for musical domination, I’ll let you know that the site in question was a typical Acai Berry diet site:
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At $60 a bottle, that’s a whole lotta love (wrong genre) to want it that way (wrong band), but with a reluctance to click on spamlinks, enable rogue apps and deploy a little password common-sense then even hugely famous pop stars like Niall can live his teenage dream (wrong gender) and let it be (nice haircuts).
Accounts on social networks with large amounts of followers are always a hot target for scammers, and musicians in particular are a magnet for bad behaviour – I’m old and crusty enough to remember poor old Alicia Keys and other singers targeted by a rather nasty bout of spam and exploits leveraging their huge popularity to attack the masses, and links on Myspace pages tended to get lost in the mass of spangly graphics, flashing backgrounds and MIDI files lunging out from your speakers. Twitter isn’t quite so fortunate, and a similar wave of targeted account hijacking – should anyone ever attempt such a thing – could give fans of bands like One Direction a bigger dilemma than which worrying about which one is the cutest (or if Mike Nesmith wore his real hat).
Christopher Boyd
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