[gdewilde]

For what it is worth, I recently found a spam bot hacked into my unused twitter account. It was using my real name so I had to clean it up. I used a new email address to be able to move the bot tweets to new user name. When registering my original user name again the experience was as described in the article. Actually, in my case it was [frighteningly] accurate down to what the user thinks.

You get to a point where it tells you to follow a preselected set of celebrities and it wont take no for an answer. There is no skip button. (I'm sure there isn't one, it took me ages to not find it.)

What drove the decision?

I think what happens is that Google picks up the new twitter account, flags it as a duplicate and increases the celebrity page rank in stead of indexing yours. It seems a good trick to make bots less effective.

But I'm guessing of course.