Stop Twitter Spam

Twitter’s anti-spam efforts took another step backwards yesterday. Several people had their accounts deleted for no apparent reason. When they attempted to restore their accounts they saw this message:

This account has been suspended due to violations of the Terms of Service. If you have questions, please contact customer support.

It’s important to note that the users who were impacted yesterday are respected Twitter users - i.e. they were not borderline spammers. This thread on Get Satisfaction has information on who was affected. People have also been blogging about their experience.

Earlier today, Twitter Product Manager Jason Goldman provided this update:

We’ve found that around seven accounts were accidentally suspended. They were mistakenly identified as spam; we are working to restore these accounts now.

While we have automated tools to identify spam, human review is still required before suspending accounts. Despite those safeguards, false positives can still occur and that’s what happened in this case.

I’m really sorry to those users who were affected by this mistake. We’re going to work a lot harder to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.

The error was also acknowledged by Biz Stone:

It’s good to see Twitter admitting they made a mistake and apologizing to the users who were affected, but this is a problem that could have been avoided. There have been warning signs for several weeks that their anti-spam algorithm was generating false positives. Until yesterday, the affected users were unable to add new followers but were still able to access their account, other people could follow them, etc. Yesterday’s account deletions are obviously more severe and they are a real slap in the face to some of Twitter’s most loyal and enthusiastic users.

This latest misstep should be a clear signal to Twitter that they need to make some significant changes to their spam detection algorithm. Twitter is under a microscope right now and yesterday’s account deletions just give more fuel to the critics who are urging people to switch from Twitter to competing services such as Plurk and identi.ca.

According to Jason Goldman’s update, the account deletions were not performed by an automated bot - i.e. there was human error involved. I think we can all accept that people will make mistakes. To prevent these types of mistakes in the future, Twitter needs to provide better tools / analytics to their employees so that they can easily distinguish good users from bad users. For example, they could calculate a reputation score, visible only to Twitter employees, based on a combination of things that contribute to an overall score: how long the user has been on Twitter, followers:following ratio, how many of their tweets have been faved by other users, how often other Twitter users reply back to the users with positive comments (the Summize search engine that Twitter recently acquired has the ability to measure this), how many times the user has been blocked, if they’ve been tagged by other users as #twitspam, etc.

This comment on the Get Satisfaction thread has some good advice for Twitter:

Jason - it seems like Twitter is attempting to address spam in a manner that is either ineffective or has a high level of false positives, even with human interaction. Spam is a difficult problem, but when you start affecting your users on a regular basis, you are losing the battle. Either the tools aren’t working or the humans aren’t doing their job. While I don’t exactly know what steps Twitter is taking, I urge you to read a couple posts I’ve put together on this in the past. I’ve had experience with this type of situation and they may help prod the devs with some other ideas as to how to help prevent spam. http://dcortesi.com/2008/04/16/addressing-twitter-spam-through-statistical-analysis/
http://dcortesi.com/2008/04/27/twitter-reputation-statistics/

-dacort

8/4/08 Update:

• It appears that the deleted accounts have been restored now. They are still working through some issues with getting the accounts 100% restored.
• Connie Crosby blogs about her Twitter account deletion experience. If you look through the comments of this post, you’ll see a comment from Identi.ca founder Evan Prodromou offering his support and hinting that there will be a way to move contacts from Twitter to Identi.ca in the future. As I mentioned earlier, competitors and critics are taking full advantage if incidents like this.