A Public Service Announcement(PSA)
for our twitter followers regarding hackers, hacked accounts and unsolicited @ links from those with whom we are not mutual followers of one another.
First a word of Encouragement: We love hearing about our follower’s work or discovering new followers as recommended by those we follow. If You currently do not follow us, but feel it is important to share Your work with us in hopes of us passing it on:
We encourage you to Follow us: @FilmTVDiversity First, it speaks volumes about your belief and support about what we do, and then share as you please with us and we are much more likely to follow back and as a result of our mutual connection, we may share your work with our followers based on our adopted guidelines
- Check first, if you’re our follower or if you've been recommended by someone we follow.
- Does your @ to us have ample explanatory text or context as to what or why you’re sharing this with us?
- Validate the link (i.e. does it have a fully identifiable web address or a shortened one, with the latter highly scrutinized if not from reputable or widely used/recognized shortening services).
- If we conclude the link appears valid, we visit the link and check the content for relevance and value add to what we support.
If all this criteria is met, we are very likely to share what you’ve shared with us to our followers.
On the flip: We may block anyone who @‘s us with links not meeting our preferred standards or hijacks conversations with unrelated links that don’t pass the above criteria, because we consider it spam.
In most cases, we freely share content of others that our current followers recommend when they @ us once we've validated at least the link works.
Our Following Guidelines:
A) We try to follow most people back, but do so in waves, your bio and or interaction with us is a major determining factor in doing so. Blank bios are like blank resumes, so we are not as likely to follow with so little to go on about you or your interests.
B) We generally do not follow egg avatars unless validated by someone we currently follow that you the account owner are a person or organization just starting out on twitter. We may change this policy at anytime and not follow any egg avatars in the future.
C) We block ALL accounts with egg avatars and undecipherable names and tweets, as most often these accounts are associated with hackers.
Regarding Direct Messages(DMs)
Any DM from us is likely preceded by a public conversation we have decided should be taken offline or is in response to a DM you sent us.
We don’t mind DM conversations or requests, however, due to a larger than normal number of DMs sent our way recently by what appears to be hacked accounts we’d, like to remind everyone of some of the tactics hackers may use to get access to your account.
In general they “prey on your fears”. 99.9% of DMs with Unsolicited links by people you follow who DM you should be approached with extreme caution, especially if the link has no explanatory or introductory or conversational related text or cyrptic messages such as:
- “is this you”,
- “someone is saying bad things about you”,
- “did you mean this or look at this photo”
etc., are likely hacked accounts looking to do the same to your account once you click the link. DON’T CLICK THE LINK no matter how tempting! Our approach is to simply delete the DM conversation.
Some recommend that you contact the person and let them know via a direct @ not via DM their account may be hacked, but we refrain from inundating our own timeline with such reminders and we may be forced to unfollow the offending account if the DMs continue.
For the most part we don't respond to DMs that appear to be auto-generated in nature which often say things like.
- "Thanks for following", check out our FB/website or look at my work..
PSA: This may all seem extreme, but our approach is predicated on protecting ourselves and our followers from Hackers and Spam via our own tweets and thus maintaining our trustworthiness and brand integrity we've worked hard for and for which our followers have come to depend on and expect for the links we share. Hence, we take hackers and spam extremely serious.
Make Your first interaction with us pleasant for us both, because we work tirelessly to ensure that all content that we share with our followers is pleasant and/or value add on some level for all our followers.
Thank You for your continued support of FilmTVDiversity and its vision through your Retweet(RT)s and interactions with us on our timeline, it is indeed invaluable and always much appreciated.
Together We are changing the face of Diversity in Film, Television and Theatre.
