No need to constantly tweet at your celebrity crush anymore. A site called "Lemme Tweet That For You" lets you create fake tweets that look like they were written by anyone you choose. This site has been around for a while, but, as Poynter reports, it has just recently been rediscovered.
At first glance, this tool is enticing. Though the site is a little buggy (we've discovered that it doesn't work on Google Chrome, for example), it's effective. You can create an image that makes it look like literally any Twitter user has said anything you want. We tried it out for ourselves and created the following "tweet":
Dreams really do come true! Just kidding. But in all serious, such a service poses dangers. Anyone can create a seemingly legitimate tweet that looks like it came from someone else's account. You can edit pretty much any aspect of the message. When you type in a username, "Lemme Tweet That For You" will automatically fill in the user's photo. You can write anything you want for the tweet itself, choose any time for the tweet to have been sent, and how many retweets and favorites it has. Then, you can tweet that out to your followers. The tweet that you send from your account is pretty transparently fake and looks like this:
Sure, that's obviously a hoax, but you can also screenshot or save images of the tweets you create and use them on websites or elsewhere (that's what I did to get the first image). As Poynter recognizes, all someone has to do is look at said user's Twitter account and see that he or she never sent the tweet in question, but there are many people who will be quickly convinced and won't think to check. What if unscrupulous Internet writers have used this tool to fake tweets from starlets? Politicians? Journalists?
From now on, take any tweet you read about on any website other than Twitter with an extra grain of salt.
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