Bonum Certa Men Certa

Are Microsoft Employees (Technical Evangelists) Using Spammers in Twitter?

Summary: Microsoft "technical evangelist" (euphemism for AstroTurfer on the company's payroll) appears to be operating some kind of bot programme that smears Boycott Novell

A CERTAIN pattern has gone on for far too long to be ignored. The target is Boycott Novell, so it ought to be finally brought up.



For those who require some background, we wrote about the subject several months ago when it had heated up greatly. We wrote about this in:



To tell the story very briefly, a Microsoft "technical evangelist" (TE) [1, 2, 3, 4] called Jonathan Wong came to this site with some "perception management" [1, 2], never revealing that he was a Microsoft employee until after he had been exposed. Then he wrote a post against us, quoting known anti-GNU/Linux people as a source of supposedly disgruntled people who have a problem with Boycott Novell. That was months ago. Since then, about a hundred times or more and almost at regular intervals, some Twitter accounts have been boosting his post. Here is an example just from the past few days:

Twitter results



See the similarity of the twits and the weird account names. In one case, two different accounts have the exact same avatar. This stream of twits has been going on like this for months. Those twits always come from accounts without a description and not a single person is following anyone else, which makes the characteristic of some kind of bot accounts. Jonathan Wong describes himself as "… a social media aficionado who loves to use social media tools to procrastinate optimize his own personal information stream." Maybe this is why Microsoft hired him.

More on Microsoft in Twitter
  1. More Microsoft AstroTurfing (aka 'Technical Evangelism') in Twitter
  2. User “Microsoft Incentives” Wants to be Your Friend, Too
  3. Microsoft's Twitter AstroTurf Continues
  4. Who is Pumping MSFT and Pimping Microsoft in Twitter?
  5. Microsoft Hires Federated Media for Twitter AstroTurfing
  6. Does Microsoft Still Create Twitter Accounts for Guerilla Marketing?
  7. Microsoft's AstroTurfing, Twitter, Waggener Edstrom, and Jonathan Zuck
  8. Microsoft Twitter Bots, FTC Blowback, and Paid-for Vista 7 Glorification
  9. Microsoft Feeds Hundreds of Korean Bloggers to Promote Vista 7

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