Twitter apologises for fake advertising endorsements

Twitter has apologised after it sent a string of fake tweets from the accounts of real users to champion one of its products.

The tech firm promoted a new advertising service on its blog earlier this week and accompanied the spiel with bogus tweets attributed to three social networkers.

The micro-blogging site has now said sorry for the “mistake” and updated its site to attribute the endorsements to its own staff.

A note on its marketing webpage now reads: “An earlier version of this blog post included an image with mock tweets from real users of our platform.

“This was not OK. Once we became aware of this mistake, we took it down immediately.

“We deeply apologise to the three users included in the earlier images.”