Stop Twitter Spam

A couple of weeks ago I posted a poll asking the question: Should Twitter moderate Trending Tropics to prevent it from being spammed?

The results are in and as of today, over 75% of the respondants are in favor of Twitter moderating Trending Topics. 16% say No and 8% aren’t sure.

I was expecting more of an equal split on this.  On the one hand, people recognize that Twitter needs to take a stance against obvious spam attacks againt Trending Topics (such as the recent attack “allegedely” by 4chan).  But at the same time, some critics are claiming that legitimate Twitter users are getting caught up in Twitter’s anti-spam dragnet.  Twitter recently admitted to accidentally suspending accounts as a result of a spam clean-up effort.  And there have been recent accusations that Twitter is overdoing their anti-spam efforts and filtering out legitimate tweets from Twitter search results.

My opinion?  I don’t think Twitter can afford to sit back and do nothing.  Louis Gray sent this tweet out after a recent attack against Trending Topics: “One need only see the top trending topic on Twitter now to recognize at times, the inmates run the asylum. Embarrassing.”. Twitter can’t afford to be embarrassed like this.  With that said, Twitter needs to refine their anti-spam algorithms and cut down on the false positives.  This raises a question.  Why do we have dozens of developers creating nearly identical Twitter clients but no major third party services attacking the problem of Twitter Spam?  Who is going to create the Akismet for micro-blogging?