While the media continues to marvel at the pivotal role of the darling social service Twitter in the Iranian election, by Thursday it became clear that the medium is still very much in its infancy.  Though current President Ahmadinejad’s opponents both within and without Iran continue to use the service as the only source of real news about the government’s state, pranksters have seized the phenomenon to disgusting, devastating effect.

Do not for the love of Jesus try that link.

Several goons – users of the Something Awful forums – created fake Twitter accounts and spammed popular search phrases and hashtags surrounding the Iranian election with the infamous Goatse.cx image.  Cleverly disguising the accounts as names of popular celebrities and pop groups and combining them with sensational headlines that suggest breaking news, their pranked links tend to get scores of retweets turning Iran’s “Twitter Revolution”  into a viral griefing engine.

Using the brain-searing, unbelievably gory butthole shot to prank highly trafficked areas is hardly new (particularly to goons), but the level of effectiveness they are seeing is unprecedented.  Abraham, the prankster responsible for the first link pictured here, has reported over one million hits.  The analytics the prankster is using does not include iPhone or API hits, making it likely that the total amount of traffic the prank sucked in is even higher.

Just watching the popular #iranelection hashtag indicates a sucker is getting a view into a hideous distended man-anus almost every minute:

Twitter - Revolutionary Medium or Grief Farm?

Twitter seems to be doing very little to stem the tide of the Goatse spam taking over the topics trending about the Iranian election.  With URL obfuscation like TinyURL and bit.ly the defacto link sharing mechanism for Twitter, each time an account gets outed as a vehicle for the prank, three more get created to wreak more havoc.  With no way of expanding links or verifying accounts within Twitter’s search interface, it will continue to be exploited by griefers, particularly during hot, high traffic events like this one.

Though Twitter’s influence on the political situation in Iran is evident, this prank highlights that the medium is still very young and has a lot of growing up to do.

No one storming the Bastille had to see the inside of a man’s asshole to start a revolution.

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