Regardless of what you think of ads on Twitter, there are some people unhappy with a new test Twitter is running which seems to be disguising sponsored tweets as regular tweets.
These tweets appear to be from highly-followed accounts, but they show up in the stream with a notation about “<name> follows” along with a tiny person icon. It is missing any reference to it being a sponsored or promoted tweets like most sponsored ones are.
Here is the example of the non-sponsored-labeled ad that someone tweeted:
@EliLanger yup. The buzzfeed tweet is the one in question. pic.twitter.com/FTbHTXs2Z9
— aleefbaypay (@aleefbaypay) August 3, 2014
It is unknown if these tweets are actually promoted or not. Is Twitter considering this just a value added tweet and something you might be interested in? Or is Twitter using the friend connection to circumvent the necessity to label these as sponsored tweets.
[…] been testing or updating lately, such as testing descriptive hashtags, embedding linked tweets, and inserting what appears to be ads simply based on who your friends […]