Stop Twitter Spam

Today Robert Scoble blogged about some new proposals for charging a premium for people who follow lots of people on Twitter. He rejects the idea and disputes the claim that users such as himself, Lea Laporte, or Jason Calacanis put more “strain” on Twitter’s system.

I’m not even going to attempt to get into that discussion because none of us really know exactly how screwed up the situation is with Twitter’s architecture. Based on blog posts like this from Twitter’s developers we know that they have work to do to turn Twitter into more of a true messaging system.

I actually like the idea of Twitter charging a premium for people who follow a large number of people because this would be a huge spam deterrent. Right now spammers are having a free lunch and Twitter (and indirectly, the Twitter community) is picking up the bill. There is absolutely no barrier whatsoever to following as many people as they they’d like in an attempt to get people to click through to their web site, either from their profile page or from Tinyurl’s that lead to a splog or a web site loaded with affiliate links.

The fact that most people are ignoring or blocking these spam users isn’t the issue. The issue is Twitter’s system resources getting chewed up by the mass-following activity (using bots scraping the public timeline or cloning following lists from popular Twitterers like yourself), not to mention all of the blocking activity that results from people getting rid of these annoying spammers. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of this mass-follow activity was the culprit or at least contributed to some of the recent Twitter outages.

Charging a premium would be a huge deterrent against the spammy mass-follow behavior. I might be wrong on this, but I think very few spammers would continue trying to squeeze click-through’s from Twitter if they had to pay for the privilege of following thousands of people.

I want to make it very clear that I’m not calling Robert Scoble a spammer (or Jason or anyone else who follows thousands and genuinely interacts with their followers) because he is following lots of people. I’m referring to the bots that start following 10K people in one day and run on auto-pilot (auto-posting tweets). With that said, I do think that these guys are getting a massive amount of publicity out of Twitter and, as a result, should be supportive of the pay model. I know that Jason is supportive of this as long as it guarantees him better uptime. Robert, would you reconsider your position on this if this resulted in less spam on the system?

Update:
I want to clarify that I think people should be charged for following lots of people, not for being followed by lots of people. So under this model, someone like Leo Laporte, who is followed by over 37,000 people but is only following 437 would not pay as much as Robert Scoble, who is followed by fewer people (25,284) but is following over 21,000.

TechCrunch has a post today about Twitter Spam titled Twitter Starts Blacklisting Spammers. I actually think the post is going to confuse some people. It mentions The Twitter Blacklist, which is not affiliated with Twitter, and a recent post on Stay N Alive, which covers a recent discussion on the Twitter Dev discussion group about how to detect users that have been “blacklisted” by Twitter. These are two completely separate things.

If you quickly scan the TechCrunch article you might come away with the impression that TechCrunch is saying that the Twitter Blacklist is what is being used by Twitter to identify spammers. If you read the article carefully you’ll see that they didn’t really say that. But at least one person came away with that impression and I’m sure there are many others.

From what I can tell, this is the process that Twitter is using to identify and deal with spammers:

1) Suspected spammers are reported to Twitter from this Help page. Another way that Twitter can be notified about a suspected spammer is a high volume of Block activity against a specific account.

2) Someone from Twitter reviews the account to determine if the Terms of Service have been violated. It’s important to note here that they are mainly looking for people who are contributing to “Follow Spam”. This is where someone follows thousands of people at a time, resulting in a New Follower email. From what I can tell, all of these spam requests are reviewed by an actual person and they are not just using a simple formula like the Following:Followers ration to make their decision.

3) Once Twitter has determined that it’s a spammer they take action against the account. I have received a number of emails from Twitter about spam reports that I have filed. Click here for an example. Some typical actions that they will take are: removing their tweets from the public timeline, suspending update capabilities, and suspending follow/unfollow privileges. Based on the Stay N Alive it appears that Twitter is going to take a stronger actions moving forward and terminate the account versus just cripple it.

This type of coverage about Twitter Spam usually generates a lot of discussion. Here are some posts from people who question whether or not this is an issue:

• Daggle - Twitter Spam: Myth or Reality?
• I’m Not Actually A Geek - Spammers on Twitter and FriendFeed: Really A Problem?

Check out TechMeme for more discussion on this.  And of course, there has been lots of discussion on Twitter about this.

Social Times has pointed out a subtle change that Twitter has made in the last couple of days. You can now see who is following someone on Twitter.

Why is this interesting to me?

Have you ever looked at an obvious spammer’s profile (e.g. Following 25,000 but only 100 following back) and wondered who is following them? Well, now you can check. I’ve checked out a few spammer accounts and noticed that many of the followers are “A-Listers” who have lots of followers and are either auto-following everyone (using a script provided by Twitter or using a tool like SocialToo or Your Twitter Karma). You’ll also see spammers following other spammers because they’re following just about everyone.

Following someone on Twitter is a form of endorsement. It means that you think they have something interesting to say, even if you don’t always agree with them. So it bothers me when I see people following spammers on Twitter because it means that someone is endorsing them and giving them some credibility. So if you click on the Followers link on a spammer profile and see one of your friends on the list, send them a Direct Message and tell them to unfollow or block that person. You’ll be doing them and the rest of the Twitter community a favor.

Update:
Now I’m thinking that this might be a subtle move by Twitter to encourage people to be more accountable for who they are following on Twitter. Before yesterday, there were 80 people following a white supremacist on Twitter. But we didn’t know who they were because Followers info was private. Now that the Followers info it totally transparent we know exactly who these 80 people are. It’s clear from the list that most of those 80 people have no idea that they are following a white supremacist. As of today (May 7th) there are a number of A-Listers such as @chrispirillo on that list. But I have to ask. If you are following this person and you are actually reading the tweets of the people that you’re following, how do you put up with reading tweets like this? How do you not unfollow or block that person?