Shelly Ryan Shmelly Ryan: A Social Experiment

August 28, 2009 - By

If you’re on Twitter, chances are you are being followed by one of the many Shelly Ryan’s of various usernames. This classic spam bot follows users and claims some nonsense about making large sums of money on Twitter. Wacky. (for example http://twitter.com/gaqQwj – this link will likely break soon)

Then one day I thought “why not make a Shelly Ryan account of my own!?” I thought it would be a hilarious way of just spamming buddies, but then a friend and I started one-upping the idea in a brainstorm. Now it’s a full blown social experiment.

Now I plan to log into my Shelly Ryan account (http://twitter.com/FakeShellyRyan) in public places, like libraries, and electronics stores like FutureShop and just see what people will tweet when they are anonymously presented the opportunity to spam the world through someone else’s abandoned account.

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I expect that the account could get shut down for suspicion of being spam. It could also be destroyed or shut down by one of the experiment participants.
So. What to get involved? The username is FakeShellyRyan and the password is password2009. Note, this password has changed, see follow up posts

Enjoy.

UPDATE:

I have also decided to follow anyone who has tweeted about Shelly Ryan. Don’t hate me, I’m being hilarious and ironic.

UPDATE 2:

This fake account quickly captured the hearts and minds of many. Many, who on a Friday night have nothing but the most vile and often disgusting things to say. I can’t say I’m really surprised, it’s something about human nature. Keep in mind this profile is now officially NSFW.

UPDATE 3:

Check out the follow up post, the summary of Phase One.

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This post was written by ArleyM