DISQUS

Chirpio · 5 months ago

We agree with everything in this article. It's a huge problem that we're trying to solve on our site where you can flag users as spammers to hopefully create a list where people can just unfollow everyone in their list that's a bad seed.

Diane Horton · 5 months ago

That's great news :)

Michael Bauser · 5 months ago

Oh, that's what "joint venture" means! I thought they were trying to recruit me to sell marijuana.

Kidding aside, I find the twitomercial accounts the most annoying, because they clog up search results. The cons and the porn-followers can be easily blocked, and often disappear pretty quickly. It's those "honest" business people who won't shut up.

I supposed twitter could try a content-based auto-throttle, so that accounts posting the same message too often have their tweet-rate limited, but that would catch a lot of people using semi-automated services like blip.fm, too, so I don't expect it to happen.

In lieu of that, I would settle for a "report spammer" button on profile pages. The current method (direct message to Twitter's spam account) is kind of dumb.

Diane Horton · 5 months ago

Very funny! Maybe we'd all be a bit more mellow about spam ... :) I agree with you though - there should be a better reporting mechanism

Digital Jedi · 5 months ago

To me, spamming Twitter is like putting your brand on a t-shirt and then standing in the middle of the mall while wearing it 8 hours a day.

Ben Parr · 5 months ago

So dead-on. Let's hope Twitter finds a way to cut off the spam flow before we have to see the rest of the iceberg.

Doubledown Tandino · 5 months ago

I hope Mashable delves into the real cons going on on twitter currently. The more advanced cons such as follower trains , and some sites that ask you to join for a special twitter service, but instead continually make you follow their bots without you realizing.
There's bigger Twitter scams currently happening involving auto-followings and bots and stuff. hope to hear more about that soon

ralphthemagician · 5 months ago

It's not just Twitter. It's the whole realm of, "social media". You've got clowns like that annoying asshole Bill Crosby who go around spamming about the, "Twitter Traffic Machine" and all sorts of other crap; and because it's an affiliate marketing pyramid scheme, you get spam from like 1,000 other people as well.

What really amazes me is that there are enough dumb people who buy into that shit ... I guess making it not so dumb after all.

Colin Surprenant · 5 months ago

twitter spam from "friends" is easy to manage, you simply unfollow spammers. I think the real problem will be with spam making its way into the twitter real-time search. Any spammer can piggyback any hot trend and fill the stream with junk and use url shorteners to hide their funky urls. I had a blog post about this recently: http://eventuallyconsistent.com/blog/2009/04/th...

Bernard Moon · 5 months ago

agree, but the growing spammers are becoming more difficult to manage. as tedious as it sounds, I look at the majority of my 6,500+ followers as my inbox fills. spammers are a minority of my would-be followers, which i block often as possible but it's becoming a growing annoyance.

Cheryl · 3 months ago

Er...didn't that guy above just spam his blog?

I've noticed that some spammers now throw in a few mundane comments before they suck up to your account like a leech. That way they look like a regular person until you visit their twitter page. Also, dead giveaway is someone who is following 1,500 people has 100+ following them and 3 posts.

Sherrie Rohde · 5 months ago

I get people following me all the time that undoubtedly are scammers. It gets annoying to sign in my email and see several variations of the same name now following me. Really? Following me will not make fall for your scam.

Your Name*tom · 5 months ago

And some of us are just trying to make a living helping others .Nice article too !

Diane Horton · 5 months ago

OMG too true...I'm just starting to get spammed more and more on Twitter and it is totally pissing me off...why can't someone figure out how to get rid of these bozo's?

den · 5 months ago

somehow I found someone/bot on twitter randomly replay other users @username with out of topic tweets.

Delfin Vassallo · 5 months ago

Great categorizing, let's hope Twitter will do something fast to get rid of those scammers... besides the platform improvement that is urgent!

Frank at Carp Data · 5 months ago

i've been followed a few times by twitter porn accounts. not good for a biz profile. @CarpData

Frank at Carp Data · 5 months ago

i've been followed a few times by twitter porn accounts. not good for a biz profile. @CarpData

Kimberly Garcia · 5 months ago

Anyone that wants to add me to Twitter that I don't know, or know of gets blocked. I am tired of the commercials.

markfinch · 5 months ago

I have a question for everyone. I get a bunch of the spam follow me accounts with only one tweet. For the most part I ignore them, but every now and then I get a Brittney or ... that is vulgar and I block.

What do you do? Do you block all spam or just the ones that are vulgar, etc?

@mashable Maybe you guys could throw up a survey. I have been thinking of going through and blocking all the spam but as it keeps coming in I figure I will wait and batch it. It would be nice to know how others handle this issue.

phineaspoe · 5 months ago

I don't seem to have this problem because I don't follow anybody without going to their account and looking at what they've been tweeting. Takes less than a minute to see if they're somebody I want to follow back or not.

I agree with Doubledown Tandino and Colin Suprenant: there are bigger problems than just having some spam (that is easily avoidable) in your personal stream.

Aleksandre Asatiani · 5 months ago

Definite advantage of twitter is that spammers cannot send you a message, or make comment on your profile. It is also very easy to find them out and block if you followed them by accident. And by just following they are not able to do any harm. Though I agree that they might start to flood the search etc.

IMHO the nice function will be the possibility to report the user (something more complicated than just click though). Because, I personally found tens of obvious spammers already (I became active twitterer just 2 weeks ago).

Aleksandre Asatiani · 5 months ago

sorry posted two times...

the system · 5 months ago

Theres no such thing as twitter spam - it's just marketing and you don't have to follow or read it

Ian Baaske · 5 months ago

Great post. I couldn't agree more.

Daniel_Honigman · 5 months ago

And the sad thing is many of them are thinly veiled. Just make sure you hover over links before clicking on them. And don't use auto-follow scripts.

Jocar · 5 months ago

I like spam and chips with tomatoe kechup Spam makes agreat meal also in a bread bun
When the first blue and yellow cans came off the production line in 1937, the world was forever changed. No one would have guessed back then, but the revolutionary new product became a war hero, a pop culture icon and an American institution. Long Live Spam

Tschai · 5 months ago

A good illustration:
I've created a twitter account some weeks ago and have not tweeted once, but 'someone'/Jessica yesterday started following me!

PS: the spam account seems to be suspended: good work twitter!

Debbie Ducker · 5 months ago

Bernard, Very interesting post. I guess I am guilty of posting "Twitomercials". I went into twitter with my business mind turned on in full. With that said I would like to hear your opinion of what you consider a proper use of Twitter? I know that this kind of thing turning bad can break businesses that are trying to use this type of medium for more exposure. Would be interesting you hear an unbiased opinion. Thanks, Debbie Ducker

Jennifer · 4 months ago

Hi, Debbie.
Can you explain what an "unbiased opinion" is? Someone who is neither hurting people with spam nor being hurt by it? Good luck.
Businesses that flood places like twitter with advertising are wanting something for nothing. That is not how capitalism works. If you want to advertise, you should pay for it out of your ADVERTISING BUDGET and do so on spaces designated for that purpose. It may be that someday, twitter will have ad banners and sidebars like all the rest of the social media spaces that are surviving, and that's your cue to get in line and buy one of their spots. My inboxes are like "personal space", no matter how many times people repeat the opposite opinion, and should not be subject to this kind of invasion. Period.
NOW: I purchased about $75 worth of product from someone I began following because she was a real person and she did not spam anyone - ever. Under her "Name" and "Location" was her "Web" link. And one day, I tweeted about having a certain need which her business actually supplied in an unique and ironically specific way. She wasn't slick or fake-friendly. She was just as astonished as I was that I was looking for exactly what she made and she told me about it with the appropriate irony. I made a mental note and when I had money, I went there and did the deed. I don't have money very often. It was my tax refund and once it was spent, it was gone. I love on $400/month. I gave her a non-renewable resource (for me) in exchange for what she created and sold and I'm glad I did. That's a big deal.
I would NEVER EVER do that for anyone who is spamming on twitter in an advertising capacity. NEVER!!!!! On principle! Even if I had a bazillion dollars and I wanted what they seemed to be selling. I refuse to support that kind of predatory behavior.

Yair Olmert · 5 months ago

There are too many spammers but also impersonators - Twitter is not doing enough - I can't get any response from Twitter so here I publish - (Hoping to get to Twitter through Mashable):

Dear Twitter - @inspectorsarit is a phony personality tweeting & distributing slander about me. As a well known Lawyer in Israel & member of the world wide known Olmert family I here and now demand that you check up this phony impersonator and block it immediately. I will not aply another time and next time you will have to meet Skadden, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom !!! Sory but ignoring my apply pushed me to take this step. Tnx
Adv. Yair Olmert -

Wayne · 5 months ago

Methinks Google Wave will overtake Twitter anyway, so some part of me has already said goodbye to Twitter.

Note on your title. Not all of these are scams btw, nor are they really spam. Spam is unwanted and uncontrolled. However, Twitter users have the ability to control that by unfollowing. Don't like what someone goes on and on about? Unfollow them. Simple, yet people still don't seem to get that.

Amazing.

Wayne · 5 months ago

I will add that those of you who auto-follow are asking for it anyway and deserve every bit of spam you get.

Again, don't want spam? Unfollow. Problem solved. Don't be brain-dead users, think for a change.

Jennifer · 4 months ago

Why should I be asked to spend at least 50% of my twitter time managing spam when I have better things to do and then tweet about doing? Why is that required of me - the user - instead of twitter and/or apps that I can program and implement to take care of it for me?
Neither unfollowing nor blocking controls spam. It keeps coming and coming with new profiles and accounts created by robots programed and implemented to do that. If I tweet that I don't want porn-bots in my inbox, I get 20 of them in my inbox within hours because they search on the word "porn" and auto-follow? How is that wanted?
Only people who are themselves hurting other people with spam insult people who are hurt by spam by calling them "dead-brain users". Clearly you value winning over losing instead of kindness over meanness or even right over wrong. How does that help you really? Why should I buy anything you are selling or saying?

Wayne John · 4 months ago

No doubt that Twitter could do much to clean up some of those accounts, I don't like them either. It's also too easy to create an account on Twitter. Once they implement some level of user verification, you'll see a huge drop in spam I suspect.

Jennifer, you're not asked to do anything, you choose to. And being that we both know that spammers are always first on the scene of the latest, hippest thing, they're going to be there. Look what happened to MySpace like Bernard pointed out, it's out of control. Hopefully that won't happen with Twitter as I myself am working on a few Twitter-centric projects and hope Twitter makes the right moves.

So, back to spammers, If they follow you, so what right? You simply ignore them. It's "they" that can see your tweets. You have to follow them back to see what they spew forth...all I'm saying is that if you use an auto-follow tool, you're asking for it and are deserving of the spam.

I routinely unfollow those I've auto-followed in error. It's a choice I made, and I can undo it.

You don't have to deal with it though.

vamsi krishna b · 5 months ago

Ban Spammers !!

Kevin · 5 months ago

Hopefuly the new rules about mass following and unfollowing should help control some of the spam on Twitter. It is a great tool that can be used in very professional ways, and I would hate to have to leave because of the level of spam. MySpace became pointless to check because not only were my friend requests only from random females wanting me to check out their "other" site, the comments became nothing by SPAM as well. The one thing Twitter has going for it though is, besides the email you choose to get when someone follows you, you can really continue on with your business without ever really knowing who is following you, and you certainly do not have to follow everyone who follows you. If you never acknowledge the spammers, they can't affect your Twiter stream...

Trudy · 5 months ago

I cannot express the raging annoyance that I feel with Twitter's block/remove issues. Spammers follow you and I don't want to see those idiots with their filthy avatars in my followers list. I block those users, yet they still appear in my followers list. I use the page for biz so I shouldn't have to make my page private...Twitter should do something about the spam problem. At least make sure the block feature works so that someone can be blocked and will not appear in my followers list and the number of followers I have has accuracy, although I don't care about the number...I simply want the trash I am speaking of OFF of my followers list and I want the BLOCK feature to WORK. I email @spam, I email the support email address, I submit tickets through the help link and nothing is ever done.

lodan · 5 months ago

Spammers are now a serious concern especially when it comes to the trending topics. I find this section of Twitter very useful myself. I keep checking it throughout the day to keep up to date. But lately (in fact for a while now) I find it takes too much time to get to the bottom of what the topic actually means because of all the unrelated and outright spam that fills these them.
I just wrote an article on this very issue. Check it out here - http://bit.ly/11dXAe

StopScam · 5 months ago

Follow me to get this and other info about scams and cons! We can stop it. At least to some degree. :)

Jonathan Nelson · 4 months ago

If you're sick of Twitter spam please check out Tweet Blocker at http://tweetblocker.com and say good bye to spam once and for all. Use our easy to use bookmarklet to report spam with one click from your browser anytime!

Kenneth Santucci · 4 months ago

I have been using the TruTwit service with great success! If you can't take the time to fill out the captcha form and verify that you are a real person then you don't get to follow me!

"Twitter spam is a drag. What if you could know for sure that your followers are truly human, and not some cyborg? TrueTwit is designed to help you:

* Verify people from robots
* Avoid Twitter spam
* Save time managing your followers

By signing up now for free, all of your new followers will get a validation notice. If they too are TrueTwit users or pass the CAPTCHA test, you get an email indicating they are a TrueTwit validated human!"

http://www.truetwit.com/truetwit/signUp

Kevin · 4 months ago

I am getting a lot of spammers following me too. I even get the same DM from the same follower 2 or 3 times. I am just glad that there are so many people making plugins and other free tools to help me clean out my account of the bozos.

BigFrank · 3 months ago

Yes. i have received some spam from generated profiles. I'm surprised nobody is spamming them with collecting login credentials and virally marketing to their members. I did some research, with enough accounts/followers you can easily hit 4 figures a day sometimes 5 figures a day.
So some of these online marketers must be filthy rich.. i mean their is an imaginary "ethic" because it appears as the tweet isnt on the same page where on most socials would be the ads, it's just in a section called "tweets" and also a free public website.

BigFrank · 3 months ago

ahh yes frank and those ads on the social media sites aren't the slightest bit enticing or tricky but they don't involve having them opt-in their email:password

nice imaginations. silly humans.

Chris · 3 months ago

Whenever you get an unsolicited email, that is obviously a scam, created by a lowlife scumbag who wants to steal you livelihood and hard earned money

Do this

Reply back with Forward

Copy EvilVoodooCurse@gmail.com

Put "You will be cursed" in the subject line

Forward this along to 5 friends

BigFrank · 3 months ago

oh wait. so the only company its affecting is the website's owner who isn't a multi-millionaire or even hundred millionaire? G willigers! and they aren't virally spreading their website all over the web , radio and tv?? man, let's fight for twitter and their millions!

BigFrank · 3 months ago

come on now frank. you know they cannot afford it. this could be a potential problem to their millions!! "potential"

BigFrank · 3 months ago

oh so, your saying it actually is good for self-awareness and more straight forward then their tactics? k gotchya. i'm out. have a nice day.

Rochester Painting Contractors · 2 months ago

I hope Twitter solves this soon. I am loving the service and don't want to have to make my account private, but the annoying spammers are making it almost impossible!