There is a lot of BS about football on twitter. It’s worst in the summer when there’s no actual meaningful football going on, and all there is to talk about is who might sign for whom. Some people even try and make money from peddling fake transfer news and asking you to click on links to sites where they’re paid per view. Others claim to be agents or that the clubs are leaking information to them deliberately as they no longer trust or like traditional media outlets. All absolute nonsense.

On Thursday I sent a few tweets pointing out the ITKs methods. The initial response when I suggested I might become ITK myself for a day was mostly ‘Yes, do it!’, so I thought I would. Obviously you need to read those from the bottom up, due to the way Twitter displays things.

I spent all of Friday making up rumours about transfers and tweeting them. (Sorry about the order – mostly it doesn’t matter.)

I got a lot of replies. Most people had seen my tweets from the night before and played along with the joke. Some hadn’t and took things seriously. A lot of things were retweeted. I actually found that things that spread round most quickly are bits of info that leave a bit of mystery – like saying a bid has been made for a player, but not naming anyone. As you can see, the tweet below got retweeted 98 times:

I threw in some obvious jokes along the way, and generally reacted to responses with smart-arse jokey comments (actually, that’s not too different from the rest of the time on Twitter now I think of it).

Naturally with all the RTs I got new followers during the day who hadn’t been aware of my advertised plan, so some people did take things seriously. Obviously if they want to unfollow again they’re quite at liberty to do so. I’m sure quite a lot unfollowed during the day as well, though numbers were going up. This is normal for me anyway – because I criticise everyone at some point, people follow when their views agree with mine on a certain topic, then unfollow when I criticise something they like (usually Arsene Wenger). One or two also said they weren’t interested in my bull, I mean performance art, and were unfollowing for the day but would be back.

As soon as midnight rolled around I tweeted this:

As I said, that was all good fun. You can see why people do it, and it’s remarkably easy to say things that can’t be proven. Not that I’m encouraging you to fill Twitter with more bull than it already has, I’m just saying watch out for those who do.

@AngryOfN5