Twitter – It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
Twitter is going through an interesting period. In the same week that Twitter is featured on the cover of Time magazine, internet veterans like Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land) are raising a flag about two growing problems: Trending Topics Spam and @ Reply Spam.
Sullivan has a great post today on Search Engine Land called ‘Twitter’s Real Time Spam Problem‘. He gives several examples of spammers hijacking the trending topics to inject links that are disguised using URL shorteners.
Even worse, spammers are hijacking the Search Engine Land twitter id (@sengineland) and sending bogus re-tweets. This damages the Search Engine Land brand because people who don’t know any better will think that the original tweets originated from @sengineland.
From Sullivan’s post:
For all the love real time search is getting, old timers know well why search engines long ago stopped doing unfiltered real time additions to their indexes. It made them too easy to spam. For a brief moment in time, Infoseek allowed for “instant updates” or additions of web pages. People, to be blunt, spammed the hell out of Infoseek with this.
It’s just going to get worse, and Twitter needs to put some solutions in place. For a start, they should pull trends. By listing trending topics, they’re in turn helping to generate all this spam, some of which may harm their own users. Pull trends until some actual spam protection is in place.
And what spam protection might that be? Some quick thoughts:
- Accounts less than a day old don’t get to show up in Twitter Search and/or show up for trending topics
- Figure a reputation score for accounts and only let those appear in for trending topics
- Partner with a service for malware detection, so that any links Twitter puts out are analyzed to be safe
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June 10, 2009 at 6:56 pm
[...] It was my first introduction to Twitter Spam, which has been well-described already but the problem of Twitter Spam happened ...