Twitter Spam is ruining my life!
August 26, 2009 | 1 Comments | Featured, Twitter
Twitter spam is getting completely out of control. Let me rephrase that – It’s getting completely out of control for me! Just take a look at my @reply wall! I never realised the extent of the problem until someone tweeted me with a trending topic in the tweet and it got picked up by spam bots quicker than I could block them… It’s been repeated over 50 times in two days now and it’s getting a tad annoying to say the least.
The spam didn’t really bother me to start with, I could deal with blocking the odd bot that followed me now and again, and they wouldn’t bother me anyway and I could ignore the odd DM but now the trending topics are near useless and doing away with these would probably solve a lot of the problems but they are part of the core of Twitter’s success, that shown on events like Michael Jackson’s death.
How do we stop the spam?
There are a number of websites dedicated to the fight against spam on Twitter such as Twitspam.org or stoptwitterspam.com and Twitter themselves insist that they are making progress against spam but I haven’t personally seen much progress at all and until ‘snow leopard’ stops trending I’m going to have to keep the push notification on my phone turned off to stop the damn thing buzzing for every spam @reply!
The best way to deal with spam is to continue to be trigger happy with the block button, I tried to report them to the @spam account but it seemed to just aggravate them and the speed in which the spamming was happening just increased! There are a couple of tools such as TwerpScanner that can give you suggestions of potential spammers or BSers or Topify that gives you the choice to vet your new followers straight from your inbox.
Twitter need to get going with some kind of image recognition that scans avatars for thongs or read tweets that contain the words ‘dirty pics’ and flag up these people. There needs to be community involvement maybe or a better algorithm. Akismet has caught over 12 billion spam messages and it’s time to integrate some of that technology into Twitter.
Will Twitter ever be spam free? No, probably not, but let’s make it bearable again.
Photo: Freezelight
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