In the past couple of weeks, the number of people following me has been steadily growing. While gratifying, it’s also become increasingly apparent that many of my new followers are spammers, who are happily migrating to Twitter from e-mail.
Until recently, I haven’t bothered to block anyone because there didn’t seem to be any harm in letting them follow me. For one, I don’t auto-follow so I never see any of their, um, updates.
But I’m starting to think this is the wrong approach. By not blocking them, you’re only encouraging them to keep following more people. As well, it makes Twitter an increasingly attractive medium for even more spammers to get involved.
So philosophically, blocking spammers makes sense. What I’m not clear about – and step up if you have any insight – are the technical reasons for blocking spammers.
By following you, is it possible, for example, for spammers to scrape your followers so they can follow these people as well? By following thousands of people, does this give spammers some kind of edge in terms of how they rank within the Twitter ecosystem? And if people auto-follow spammers, does this give their links more Google juice?
For tips on how to cut down on Twitter spam, check out this post I did a couple of weeks ago, which includes links to spam-blockers such as TweetBlocker. As well, Twittercism is running a survey on why people block spammers.
10 Comments
Hi Mark,
Technically speaking we are trying to make it as easy as possible to block spammers that might be:
A. Following You
B. You're Following
Our hope is that by years end we will have more than 100 different metrics or signals in which we're able to pinpoint spammers on http://tweetblocker.com.
We've seen in our test research that a good majority of spammers on Twitter follow a lot of rudimentary email spam tactics. For example, content filtering techniques relied on the specification of lists of words or regular expressions. So, if we detect spam tweets like "increase your followers by 10,000", our system might place these words in the metric configuration. Our training set would then reject and mark as spam any tweet containing the phrase.
All in all it's a numbers game. The more people who actively submit spam reports and block spammers the better our training set becomes. So far we've recruited Tweetie app and are trying to get Tweet Deck, Seesmic and others on board.
You can make a difference!!!
By clicking on the links and voting up 3 points you will increase the chances of your favorite Twitter client integrating with Tweet Blocker.
Tweet Deck: http://bit.ly/Qne9l
Seesmic: http://bit.ly/1bDDNA
Also, if you have an idea or see that we can improve the app somehow please share your feedback here: http://tweetblocker.uservoice.com
Thanks,
Jonathan Nelson
Product Director | Hashrocket Labs
http://www.hashrocket.com
Hi Mark. I've started blocking my spam followers. It's frankly embarrassing to have a friend, colleague or family member click over to your follower list and discover a bunch of avatars of half-naked people.
Robert, that's an excellent point.
cheers, Mark
You can find a person's followers without the need to actually follow them (ie as long as you have an account yourself, you can see the followers of any other public twitter acct)
A lot of spammers are also looking for the "auto follow" so they can start Direct Messaging their spam to you.
Blocking spammers is always the right thing to do, always. Letting them follow you gives them the message that spamming is ok on twitter.
Re: Robert's comments. This is my primary reason for blocking followers. I don't want colleagues or business acquaintances seeing that attached to me in any way.
Also, I have some vague hope that if enough people block spammers Twitter (proper) can remove the accounts and purge all history of their existence.
Hey Mark,
Spam is a huge and growing problem within Twitter, not a lot unlike it was in the early days of email. Now, although one person's spam may be another's key interest, it is important the we each interptet spam in our own way and block it. If it's spam to you, it's likely spam to your followers (who are like you). More importantly, spam is becoming a carrier of some very, very nasty payloads. We've already seen evidence of that in Twitter. Spammers will invade your followers in a number of different ways. There are many tactics already being deployed with more to come.
One key thing to watch out for is even if you receive email notifications when you are followed, spammers get past this and can follow you without you even knowing they are there. That is why reviewing your new followers in the Twitter interface on a regular basis or using a product like Tweetblocker is so important. Those that "sneak" in are potentially the most dangerous.
Steve,
I wonder how spammer are able to bypass the notification system. As well, I've noticed recently the appearance of new friends who I've never followed.
Mark, I don't know. I've asked Twitter the same question (but no response yet). I know it's not coincidence as the only ones who seem to "sneak" in are definately unwanted types Perhaps there is some kind of an API back door. But however they are doing it, it seems to be an attempt at getting unnoticed access. This is when I really became suspicious of the whole spam issue.
Timely article. I agree completely, although like you, unclear about the technical reasons.
I have around 600 followers but have blocked well over 1000. Probably closer to 2000. I never auto-follow. I block not only spammers, but accounts whose sole purpose is to sell.
Folks that complain about the amount of spam in their inbox have only themselves to blame since DMs can only come from accounts that YOU follow.
Twitter has to come up with a much better way of vetting these spammers.
Thanks for the spot-on article!
@uMCLE
I've had probably 10-15 spammers follow me with a new tactic tonight. They have 0 tweets and nothing unusual in their profiles… except a profile pic with a semi-nude woman and the URL in the pic. How's Twitter gonna catch that? Maybe they'll find a way… until then I'm doing my part by blocking the spammers.
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