There was a bot/person winning competitions run by local companies in Kenya, that selected a random winner from tweets that had their hashtags: https://eugeneqa

There was a bot/person winning competitions run by local companies in Kenya, that selected a random winner from tweets that had their hashtags: https://eugeneqaana.wordpress.com/2015/01/23/the-safcom-scams/ https://eugeneqaana.wordpress.com/2015/01/23/the-safcom-scam... (Ignore the wrong conclusion though) So to answer the writer, yes, someone had thought of it before. It was probably not as sophisticated.