Next time your friend whispers some scurrilous rumor in your ear, then leans back and swears “It must be true! I saw the tweet!” be forewarned: tweets ain’t always what they seem.
Not with a website like TweetForger lurking on the internet.
TweetForger, you see, lets anyone create a realistic-looking tweet supposedly written by someone else. Even Barack Obama, if the mood takes you.
Or to put it another way – if you can think of 140 characters you’d like to put into someone else’s mouth, TweetForger’s the quickest and easiest way to do it.
The fake tweet is just a web page. It doesn’t actually appear on Twitter. Not unless you share its URL there. And the site goes out of its way to make sure people know these are fake tweets – move your mouse even a tiny bit over one of the fake tweets, and a big warning message appears, yelling: “This is a FORGED tweet!”
That said, the fakes look very real to the casual viewer. And grabbing a screenshot of a faked tweet, then forwarding that around to your friends – well, that’s as easy as Command+Shift+3 or PrintScreen, depending on your computing habits.
Fear not, TechLand readers: if you’re worried about people using TweetForger against you, just add your name to the whitelist and they won’t be able to. Someone had better tell Barack about that.