Twitter Apologizes To Three Users For Faking Tweets In Blog Post

Hey @Neil_Gottlieb, @WilliamMazeo, @subhash_tewari – so sorry about the confusion earlier today. We’re fixing the problem now.

— Twitter Advertising (@TwitterAds) July 23, 2013

That’s the apology that Twitter sent out yesterday to three users whose accounts were used without their knowledge in Twitter’s blog post about its TV ad targeting product.

As SFGate.com first reported, Twitter was caught making up tweets from those three users in a screenshot that was published on Twitter’s blog. In the original screenshot, Twitter created tweets from those three that talked about a San Francisco business called The Barista Bar. Here’s the original image as captured by SFGate.com.

You can click for a slightly larger version if you’d like; the three tweets all involve the users talking about a Barista Bar TV commercial.

Twitter eventually updated its post with a new screenshot that now shows fake tweets from three Twitter employees.

It’s a minor misstep on Twitter’s part, but embarrassing, nonetheless. William Mazeo, one of the users credited with a fake tweet in the original image, tweeted back after Twitter’s apology, “don’t do this again.”