Twitter question

[WorkingItOutAsIGo]

I am feeling very concerned about something.

Yesterday, I received a Follow Request on Twitter from one of the key trans supporters - not one of the major major names discussed daily here but certainly in the top 10. How did this person find me to ask to follow me? I have less than 10 followers, and have a similar number of tweets, the most recent of which was over a year ago. I only use my Twitter account to read tweets: I never like or follow or retweet anything. So according to everything I have read online I should be completely invisible on Twitter. It is meant to be impossible to see who has read your tweets.

Yet over the last week, the standard newsfeed I get from Twitter has stared being full of TRA names and now I have this Follow Request. I can understand Twitter doing analytics to serve me up content based on what I read, but am very unnerved by this Follow Request.

Does anyone have any idea on how this has happened? Or has this person asked to follow the whole of Twitter and just found me that way? My Google account is also asking me to sign in again this morning so am doubly unnerved.

Is there a new version of term blocker to find people rather than block them? I think another poster also mentioned getting a follow request from an activist a few days ago.

Twitter does suggest tweets to read etc ‘because you engaged with tweets about.....’ I also see suggestions of people to follow but not people who have not posted in ages. Mysterious!

No ideas re google sign in.

Have you been liking tweets or following people as that will bring you up in people to follow if they look at other gender critical accounts.

You say a request to follow- does that mean your account is set to private? If so just ignore, don’t block or refuse the request, let them think the account is dead and they’ll move on

Thanks for replies - no, I have been deliberately not following nor liking or tweeting or anything. I never engage on Twitter. Thats why I thought I was invisible and find it strange to have been 'found'. Everything I can read online suggests I should be invisible so if I ave been found that suggests something odd is happening or something has changed.

I have no expertise but maybe it’s a good idea to use unlinked email accounts for all your social media personas and change passwords regularly and do all the other social media hygiene things just in case if you are not already doing so?

Twitter suggests people to follow, and the Twitter algorithm knows you're interested in trans issues. The most likely answer IMO is that twitter suggested to this person they follow you and they clicked to follow without much thought.

I use a separate email account for my MN account(as we'll probably all get doxxed again someday) and for my GC social media accounts. It'd be a good idea to do this IMO.

Odd things happen. I woke up the other day to find a random, not very clever tweet from 2012 had been liked by someone with a new account and one follower. It made me feel very creeped that they must have scrolled through my entire feed to get back to 2012 and I promptly blocked them. I should have taken a screen grab in case I wanted to look more closely at their activities but I was in a befuddled early morning state.

I have been feeling slightly paranoid, deleted my account here, this is a new one and new name obv as I realised the obsolete email I had used when I opened the account was potentially identifying. There are twitter related reasons why I need to be careful just now so..

Also I've just finished reading "So you've been publicly shamed" by Jon Ronson (slow to get into, 2nd half more interesting than first) which gives a powerful reminder to be careful about those silly jokes on SM which if taken the wrong way can lead to disaster. Lecture to teens coming up.
But I was struck by his explanation of Google algorithms and how to get a name lost down beyond page two of the search results, a place where normal people don't look.
"According to Google's own research into our eye movements 53% of us don't go beyond the first two search results...."
This prompted a discussion with DH to which neither of us have the answer. Is google researching all our eye movements or is that statistic from a volunteer research population? Does this mean that if we are on our laptops or computers with a camera, that when we are on google they are watching us and recording our eye movements? I rarely use my laptop to go on the internet, mostly using iPad or phone. What about the camera eye on that?
My teens are more paranoid (or savvy) than me and always have a bit of post it note over the camera on their laptops. I haven't bothered before but will now.

Sorry for the slight derail but I'm interested and shocked by these issues.

Thanks all. I am slightly reassured by the possible explanations that this was fairly impersonal; but nonetheless perturbed that what should be anonymous activity on Twitter is somehow being monitored and reported and TRAs can identify me. I think I will switch to an anonymous Twitter account. But what kind of Orwellian world are we living in!!

FannyCann Google is doing what a lot of organisations do, they have studies tracking eye movement with volunteers using sophisticated technology to record what they are looking at.

Eyetracking research is used in many fields. When it comes to websites, it's important to know where people look, how long they look and what they move on to. The most famous eyetracking pattern was suggested to be an F-shape, which is created when you take the eyetracking data and convert it into a heatmap superimposed over the website the volunteers were reading.