Have you ever wondered why there are always a handful of people following a Twitter Spammer? Who would choose to follow an obvious spammer? Graham Smith makes some great points about how the “celebrity type” Twitterers are often blindly following these spammers because many of them use “auto follow” scripts, which allow them to automatically follow each new follower without having to go to their profile page and click the ‘Follow’ button.
It’s very understandable why they are using these scripts and you can’t really fault them for using them. Manually reviewing each new follower is nearly impossible when you have hundreds of new followers per day. But this is corrupting the social graph. In many ways, you are defined by who you are following. What kind of message does it send when you are following sex and Viagra sites? Would you ever consider having these types of sites in your shared RSS feeds?
My point is that by allowing yourself to automatically Follow out of a ‘you follow me so I will follow you’ attitude, you are opening yourself and your Web Site to be linked to these awful ‘institutions’.
What really made me write this post is that it is apparent that the more celebrity type Twitter personalities are also following these sexual orientated sites. I am sure if they really knew they may think twice.
It would be reasonable to assume that they just automatically Follow due to the insane number of requests that they get. I’m not a celebrity Twittlet and I sure as heck don’t want to be associated with these sites, so I don’t think it’s a far leap to come to the same conclusion for more famous Twittlets.
Simply, take time to check out any new Followers that you get. Don’t allow yourself to get hooked on getting a high Follower number at the expense of some common decency. Don’t allow these ’spammer’s to propagate their message and sordid sexual slave perversions. They are easy to spot even if you don’t check out the URL, they are the ones usually Following 100’s whilst only a few are actually Following them.
- Graham Smith: Twitter and the sordid case of the sex followers (04/15/08)
