How People Are Tweeting From Pretend Devices

Have you seen the news? A “teen girl” went viral for tweeting from an “LG Smart Refrigerator” when her mother took away her phone. But that was fake—there’s no LG Smart Refrigerator with a built-in Twitter client.

As BuzzFeed News explains, this is just a new type of meme. People send ridiculous tweets and make them even more ridiculous by filling out a fake device name the tweet was sent from. It’s easier than you might think.

It turns out you—or anyone else—can send a tweet “from” any device you like. It’s pretty simple: Twitter wants developers to build devices that can send tweets. So Twitter will let anyone create a free developer account, create a “device,” and then enter an “app name.” Want to tweet from  a “Windows 10 Smart Toilet?” Yup, you can do that.

That’s basically the process. Following through is a little more complicated than it sounds, as you’ll need a Twitter client that you can provide your developer keys to. For example, K0902 on Reddit explains a simple way to tweet from any device using a Python script. It’s pretty simple as programming goes, but can’t be accomplished in just a few clicks.

That’s how it works right now, anyway. With these memes becoming more widespread and the knowledge of how to tweet from fake devices out there, Twitter might see a stampede of new fake devices and might start shutting things down.

Twitter doesn’t really want people tweeting from GUCCI SmartToilets™, does it?