Stop Twitter Spam

The new technique is to add no details to your bio, just a web address, set up a feed to post continuous tweets of third-party news automatically to make it look like the lights are on and then try and ‘follow’ as many accounts of as possible. We are a key market of ‘early adopters’ likely to sneeze their idea. People who are chuffed to be followed click-though to the URL to try and work out who their new ‘follower’ is as there is no name given.

It gets better – everytime they unfollow & follow you again you get an email from Twitter about your renewed subscriber, prompting yet another visit or click-through. Many people are now simply ignoring followers following 500+ people as they may be spam, or it’ll be impossible to have a conversation with them amongst the noise anyway.

- Robin Blandford, byte Surgery (04/14/08)