[1][5][6] The earliest recorded usage of the Twitter bomb is from August 2008, when it was used by bloggers Liza Sabater and Kenneth Quinnell in response to Republican use of the #dontgo hashtag relating to offshore oil drilling.
[2] An example of a Twitter bomb was the campaign organized by online activists in response to a July 31, 2009 Washington Post article on Hillary Clinton that was deemed sexist.
Dhiraj Murthy writes: Twitter has received significant media attention in its use to disseminate information during disasters, including the 2008 Mumbai bomb blasts (Dolnick, 2005) and the January 2005 crash of US Airways flight 1549 (Beaumont, 2009).
This is done in hopes that the authors of the existing posts will repost the response to their own followers, spreading the Twitter bomb before the fake account is deleted.
[12] With regards to numbers, an example of a Twitter bomb analyzed in one research paper described how nine fake user accounts produced 929 posts in 138 minutes, all with a URL to a political website, presenting negative views on the U.S. politician Martha Coakley.