Twitter Spammers, Who Are They?

June 4, 2008

Those of us who use Twitter a lot know that Twitter is out of the early adopters phase. Twitter is practically becoming a standard bearer for micro-blogging (which of course is sad when you consider how often Twitter crashes).

It is only a matter of time before spammers take on new mediums and start using them to sell their crap. OF course, what they’re going to run up against is something they’ve not dealt with before. This is the world of SOCIAL media. Social is all about people. And in this new era of social media, people have control over what they’re going to assume. And there is nothing that pisses people off more online than unsolicted marketing BS. Especially when they’re trying to chat it up with friends and colleagues.

Twitter is already having server problems. A bunch of spammers trying to mass-tweet credit card offers, porn or mortgage deals is surely not going to help. The StopTwitterSpam blog posts this from /dev/null/Kevin:

Twitter’s scale problems stem from the fact that the workload increases geometrically as every message people send is forwarded to each follower. The more followers people have, the slower twitter is. The follow-spammers just increase that load. Some of these spammers follow 25,000 people. That’s 25,000 extra message each time any of those 25,000 tweet. There are hundreds of follow-spammers, so that’s hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of extra tweets.

The Twitter API opened up Twitter to all kinds of load issues. You have people using auto-follow scripts (Scoble among them unless he turned it off), for example. This takes all the human judgement out of the following process and means that if a spammer follows you, you’re opening yourself up to it. The API also leads to mass-follow programs like TwitterAdder and Twitter Friend Adder. These asinine efforts to gain as many friends as possible leads to the unintended consequence of the spammers having a frickin’ field day!

So, yes, Twitter DOES have a spam problem.

I personally do not use an auto-follow script on my Twitter account. I think it is a stupid, bonehead move to use one of those things. It just opens you wide up to spammers. Anybody on Twitter who has several thousand people they are following and perhaps only a few hundred following them - HUGE red flag. Also, by actually looking at their tweets, I can tell whether this is a real person who contributes to the conversation or another damn spammer.

Another effort to curb Twitter spam (and a case of Twitter fans taking matters into their own hands) is Twitter Blacklist. The site lists known spammers on Twitter. And they very astutely lay out the problem on their about page:

Spam on Twitter has reached the point that it did for email in the late 1990s and blogs and wikis in the early 2000s, with unscrupulous scumbags producing software that allows them to produce giant waves of fake identities which can be used to pump out unsolicited messages, or links to fake websites that ultimately attempt to get them money via numerous forms of trickery.

There are two kinds of commercial Twitter spam that we’ve identified so far: the kind that follow lots of people, and the “stealth” type that set up interlocking networks of fake accounts. You can see these on the list with a “follow factor” of zero.

The homepage of Twitter Blacklist lists known spammers and gives them a rating.

Twitter is using it’s own blacklist as well, but they do not make it public knowledge. With the relative silence of Twitter in the face of these hurdles they face, I almost trust a third-party user of Twitter to better tackle this issue than Twitter themselves. Twitter seems to have a reaction time of at least a year to anything that happens to them. Twitter spam certainly isn’t a new problem.

My advice? Stop seeing your follower count as some kind of status symbol. If you’re using mass friend adder programs or auto-follow, you should knock if off. Not only does it defeat the point of Twitter, but it is like broadcasting your email address openly to every spam list on the planet. Early adopter or not, practice some common sense.

Social Media