Today Twitter introduced a "hacked materials" warning tag, intended to appear on tweets that include or link to hacked-gotten gains. But users already realized you can easily trick Twitter into adding the warning to tweets without linking to actual hacked materials.
Here's Tom Warren, senior editor at The Verge:
The trick, for as long as it lasts: append a "bad" URL that leads to "hacked materials" to the end of a "good" URL, separated by a hash symbol, like so.
https://boingboing.net/#http://hackedmaterialshere.net
The good url will be embedded; the "bad" URL will trigger the warning. What's going on? The hash symbol means the bad URL is really just a HTML anchor in the good URL. But twitter's algorithm isn't noticing that, it's just dumbly looking for URLs in strings of text. (I will not be doing this from the Boing Boing account, it's already quite played out this morning.)
