Stop Twitter Spam

We started this blog a few weeks ago after reading this post on Mashable: Is Twitter About To Have a Big Spam Problem?. Most people will agree that the problem has only gotten worse over the past few weeks. Earlier today Mashable posted again about this issue: Twitter Spam Spirals Out of Control, where they propose the use of CAPTCHA for all new followers.

CAPTCHA would certainly help, but it is not going to be a silver bullet because so much of the spam bots are adding followers using scripts that access the API. If you have thoughts / ideas on whether or not CAPTCHA should be used, the best place to comment on this is this discussion thread on Get Satisfaction.

Today’s post on Mashable also included this Yes / No survey question:

Is it time for Twitter to move aggressively to prevent spammy accounts?

As of 9:35 PM PST on April 14th, the results are:

That’s an overwhelming 92% Yes. Click here for the latest survey results. Kudos to Adam Ostrow at Mashable for continuing to give visibility to this serious issue.