What is Horse_Ebooks? Twitter devastated at news popular spambot was human after all
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Your support makes all the difference.The world shook, melted, then reassembled as a slightly less magical place for thousands of Twitter users this afternoon as it was revealed that the popular account Horse_Ebooks, which appeared to be a spambot, tweeting gnomic fragments of internet flotsam, was in fact the work of a REAL HUMAN BEING, just pretending to be a machine, for a piece of performance art. You can read the New Yorker article exposing Horse_Ebooks here. And we've compiled a funereal selection of Horse_Ebook tweets, so you can see what entranced the 212,000 followers, before the veil was pulled away... (We like to think not getting it is the point). In response to the news, author Hari Kunzru tweeted "Internet devastated." Peter Serafinowicz added "I'm sad about @Horse_ebooks", like finding out about Santa Claus. Brilliant though". Tom Phillips, of Buzzfeed, kept things in perspective: "burn everything", he implored.
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