@davidgadarian called out the pattern on his Twitter feed this morning:  “#pleasestop I seem to be attracting a run of new followers who are young attractive and who have no profile descriptions…”  Me too.

A pattern defines a game. And while this game is more sophisticated than flat-out spamming, and probably gets a higher click-though because of it, it’s worse in a way, because it wastes the time it takes to actually see that it’s spam. I saw the same kinds of ‘Follows’ Gardarian no doubt did. The fictional females in question had reasonably believable names. They were following more than a thousand people, so it wasn’t one of the totally ‘empty’ profiles that often characterize Twitter spams. But when Yolande and Aura both have the same profile photo, you know the ‘un-game’ is on.

The tweets from these fictions had a kind of personality to them, touchpoints to popular culture.

A quick look reveals the commercial objective of selling new technology. Not that there’s anything wrong with selling technology, but to do it using fictions like these only calls the authenticity of the merchandise itself into question. Can I count on the reliability of a product when I’ve been tricked into it by a bot? Spam by any other name is still spamming.

I’d dig deeper into this to find out what agency is behind this faux cleverness, but I’ve already spent enough of my time and intelligence on it, and can only echo David Gadarian. #pleasestop! Brands who play inauthentic games like these are wasting time–their possible customers’ and their own. Deceitful narratives always come with a cost, and the biggest problem is that the deceivers have no way of knowing or controlling what that cost is going to be.