Yeah, this sort of thing isn't new. You just never hear about it due to how well it works. The OP has actually made a lot of people angry by making this public (not me, though). There are other ways to game these platforms. Twitter is actually quite susceptible in other ways (not telling). Anyhow, next time be smart about posting stuff like this. There are quite a lot of bad people gaming these platforms. A mistake and you could be on the cross hairs of a botnet.