Twitter Spam Prevention Attracts More Spammers

Written on 4th September 2008                                                                                                              COMMENT
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

On August 21 Twitter announced it would turn up the heat on spam. They introduced some measures to keep spammers from abusing the system including a new rule that forbid people from following more than 2000 people. Unsurprisingly spammer did not give up on twitter and are now finding new ways to game the system.

On the right here is a screenshot of my Inbox with Twitter  notifications. As you can see these are clearly computer generated usernames.

Twitters new anti spam measures seem effective up to a certain point. Yes, the accounts are now suspended and show a message explaining that this might be a fake account: “This account is currently suspended and is being investigated due to strange activity”. Unfortunately the current fix only becomes effective after the damage is done:

It seems the sign-up process is currently too easy to automate and will keep attracting spammers looking for an easy way to reach an audience. The fight against spam will be an ongoing battle for Twitter. But you can help too! If you see a clear Twitter spammer just Tweet the following:

@spam @spammername

That will alert Twitter and will give them a chance to suspend the account before too much damage is done.