Stop Twitter Spam

One thing that you’ll notice about spammers on Twitter is that they have horrible content. In many cases, their tweets are nothing but a repetitive series of links loaded with tinyurl’s that point to their splog or affiliate marketing site. Other spammers will scrape the public timeline and use a script to re-purpose (a.k.a. re-tweet) other people’s tweets as their own. This isn’t just annoying – it’s stealing other people’s content.

The Send Chocolate blog recently did an excellent, detailed post about this nasty trend. Take a look at this screenshot of Re-Tweet Spammer @jennyvalley’s timeline.

If you do a Summize search on some of the phrases from @jennyvalley’s tweets – for example: “precious quiet morning alone” – you’ll see that these tweets are not original. They were stolen from other people without their knowledge or consent.

So why do I bring this up? Well, it turns out that Twitter is aggressively going after spammers on Twitter who re-tweet other people’s content. The other day, Twitter employee Crystal provided this update on the Get Satisfaction site (thanks to @mdy for the tip on this):

Hi Guys,

We are actively ridding the system of spammers, it’s true. A large number of “re-tweet” accounts have been removed in the last 24 hours. (A “re-tweet account” is an account that is following many people, and simply duplicating messages from the public timeline instead of posting original updates.)

If your follower number drops, this may be why. If you notice that you’re missing numerous followers and you’re absolutely sure they are not spammers, please send a request to support with the user names of the people in question, and we’ll check it out for you.

And just today, Twitter co-founder / Obvious CEO Ev Williams provided this update in response to a question about Twitter Spammers:

So if you’ve seen a drop in your Twitter Followers over the past few days, don’t worry. It’s not something that you did or said. It’s just Twitter doing a little house-cleaning. And I’m happy to report that @jennyvalley appears to have been one of the spammers that was included in this clean-up. That account no longer exists.