About
While Twitter is, for the most part, spam-free, there is a growing problem with Follower Spam. Biz Stone from Twitter described the problem on the Twitter blog:
Posting links to Twitter is great and we encourage people to do so. However, spammers are posting links on a whole different scale and they’re doing something else we call Aggressive Following. This behavior entails following thousands of other accounts in the hope of reciprocation and it really peeves Twitter users because many of us are sensitive to our Follower count—we don’t want email notifications triggered by spammers and we don’t want to see our avatar on their profile page.
Those who have created thousands of accounts, posted thousands of the same link, or aggressively followed way too many people, stand out like a sore thumb to our support team because they are usually blocked by hundreds or thousands of well behaved Twitter users. This simple feedback is one of the ways we detect and delete spam accounts but there are also preventative measures and more we could be doing.
Here are some characteristics of a Twitter spammer:
- Follows a large number of people (hundreds or thousands) in a very short period of time
- Uses bots / screen-scrapers to build up a list of people to follow
- Little regard for following people based on similar interests
- Tweets are mostly links back to their blog / web site
Why is this spam? Because each time that one of these spammers start to follow you, you get a New Follower e-mail. The e-mail looks like this:
Subject: Make More Money999 is now following you on Twitter!
Hi, Joe Smith.
Make MoreMoney999 (makemoney999) is now following your updates on Twitter.
A little information about Make MoreMoney999:
12 followers
18 updates
following 1028 people
The Twitter Team
Sometimes it’s obvious from the User ID, avatar, or Following / Followers stats that this is a spammer (High Following to Followers ratio). But many spammers are gaming Twitter to level out their Following/Followers ratio, so it’s not always clear from the email that this is a spammer. So you click through to their profile and see that their tweets and Profile URL are spam links. This is good old fashioned email spam in a new form.
Stop Twitter Spam is not objecting to:
- Businesses using Twitter as a way to do conversational marketing or provide support as long as they are using an opt-in approach for building their list of Followers
- People using Twitter like Instant Messenger. If you think someone is sending you too many tweets, just un-follow them.
- People who are using Twitter to broadcast mundane details of their life like eating a tuna sandwich
The main objection here is people spamming the Twitter community with these new Follower notices in an attempt to build a community on Twitter. We are submitting ideas for battling Twitter Spam on Get Satisfaction, which is Twitter’s platform for customer support.
If you are aware of a Twitter spammer, the best thing that you can do today is block that user. You can also report the spammer to Twitter by following the @spam account and then sending a direct message or @ reply to @spam (more details here). Twitter has been doing a great job of responding to these spam reports. In addition, they actively monitor blocking activity and will suspend the account if enough people block it in a short period of time.
If you’d like to get involved in Stop Twitter Spam, send me an e-mail or contact me on Twitter.
If you’re looking for a way to eliminate the New Follower email alert, read this Anti-Spam Settings/Tools guide. But be warned, turning off this email means that you won’t be alerted when non-spammers (friends, family, readers of your blog, etc.) start to follow you on Twitter. And it doesn’t block the spammer from following you. Before turning off the New Follower email, you should consider signing up for Topify. They provide an enhanced version of the New Follower email with additional information (Bio, Profile URL, Following/Followers ratio, recent tweets, etc.), making it easier to identify spammers just by looking at the email.
If you’re looking for a current list of Twitter Spammers, I highly recommend the TwitSpam.org site. You can also follow them on Twitter. If you want to contribute to their list, you can just send a tweet with the user id of the spammer(s) and “#twitspam” or “#twitterspam” in the same tweet and they’ll find it as long as your Twitter account isn’t protected. For example, “@brenda1234 is a spammer #twitspam”.
- Mike
