Promoted tweets have been part of the Twitter service since 2010, and they've allowed advertisers to pick and choose who sees specific ads based on "what a user chooses to follow, how they interact with a Tweet, what they retweet, and more." But users have found how loosely those ads are monitored or filtered before they reach users' eyeballs—and how cheap, fast, and easy the system can be exploited to annoy users as opposed to "engaging" them.

On Monday, hacker Andrew "weev" Auernheimer explored these vulnerabilities at length while paying for a promoted tweet of his own—one that asserted that white people should "defend ourselves from violence and discrimination." His Storify post on the matter made his trolling intent clear: he wanted "to see what women and minorities think about [the tweet]."

"I decided to spend a few pennies on Twitter ads today," his post started, and he asserted that the platform's pricing structures "don't seem to take into account that one might want only to generate negative reactions to ad campaigns." Though Auernheimer didn't say exactly which users/groups he chose to target in his trolling campaign, he listed examples that appeared to jive with the sample of angry responses that followed: people who are active in Democratic political campaigns or animal rights groups; women who shop for fine jewelry; followers of known feminist sites like Jezebel and Feministing.

The Storify post reposted some of the angriest responses that the original promoted tweet received—mostly complaints about "white supremacist" content. Auernheimer went so far as to follow certain users' activity after their first responses: "One of the above posters gives up complaining saying I'm 'not worth the energy'; minutes later, he's complaining to Twitter's CEO," he wrote.

Auernheimer pointed out an inadvertent thing he discovered after his promoted tweet campaign went live. Users who had previously blocked his Twitter account were still subjected to his ad. "I'm sure later I'm going to have some fun using selective targeting to put some ads in front of people who might really object to my presence in their timeline," he wrote.

Twitter connects "losers" to "Twilight"

When asked about Auernheimer's promoted tweets, a Twitter spokesperson pointed out that the tweets in question had been deleted because they violated the service's hate/sensitive ads policy. The representative declined to comment on whether the promoted tweets service would be tweaked or altered in light of Auernheimer's targeted trolling stunt.

A February Medium post by Portland Web developer Andy Baio explored similar issues with promoted tweets, in which he suggested that he could target a swath of legislators or Twitter employees in one fell swoop. He had a laugh with the system's automatic suggestions for targeting terms ("losers" brought up "Twilight," he found), and he also played around with the "promoted-only" tweet option. With that, an advertiser can toggle options so that a promotional tweet does not appear on their normal account if they don't want it to. "Want to have a tantrum on Twitter without the accompanying consequences?" Baio wrote. "Go nuts."

Though Auernheimer's post didn't mention exactly how much money he spent, the hacker claimed that the amount he paid was "super cheap," and the Storify post title's use of "Day One" hinted at more shenanigans to come.