Stop Twitter Spam

TechCrunch has a post today about Twitter Spam titled Twitter Starts Blacklisting Spammers. I actually think the post is going to confuse some people. It mentions The Twitter Blacklist, which is not affiliated with Twitter, and a recent post on Stay N Alive, which covers a recent discussion on the Twitter Dev discussion group about how to detect users that have been “blacklisted” by Twitter. These are two completely separate things.

If you quickly scan the TechCrunch article you might come away with the impression that TechCrunch is saying that the Twitter Blacklist is what is being used by Twitter to identify spammers. If you read the article carefully you’ll see that they didn’t really say that. But at least one person came away with that impression and I’m sure there are many others.

From what I can tell, this is the process that Twitter is using to identify and deal with spammers:

1) Suspected spammers are reported to Twitter from this Help page. Another way that Twitter can be notified about a suspected spammer is a high volume of Block activity against a specific account.

2) Someone from Twitter reviews the account to determine if the Terms of Service have been violated. It’s important to note here that they are mainly looking for people who are contributing to “Follow Spam”. This is where someone follows thousands of people at a time, resulting in a New Follower email. From what I can tell, all of these spam requests are reviewed by an actual person and they are not just using a simple formula like the Following:Followers ration to make their decision.

3) Once Twitter has determined that it’s a spammer they take action against the account. I have received a number of emails from Twitter about spam reports that I have filed. Click here for an example. Some typical actions that they will take are: removing their tweets from the public timeline, suspending update capabilities, and suspending follow/unfollow privileges. Based on the Stay N Alive it appears that Twitter is going to take a stronger actions moving forward and terminate the account versus just cripple it.

This type of coverage about Twitter Spam usually generates a lot of discussion. Here are some posts from people who question whether or not this is an issue:

• Daggle – Twitter Spam: Myth or Reality?
• I’m Not Actually A Geek – Spammers on Twitter and FriendFeed: Really A Problem?

Check out TechMeme for more discussion on this.  And of course, there has been lots of discussion on Twitter about this.