Twitter Spam: What Can We Do?

If I believed in God, I'd thank him for the block link on every Twitter user's page. This certainly isn't news, but we've all been getting more and more follows from spammers. This evening I tweeted this:

Although we all have this problem, and although we're all connected in a remarkable way, we're all dealing with this problem alone. My tweet above was an attempt to warn my tweeps, that they might block these two preemptively. I just wanted to do something to in some way fight back. Sort of silly in retrospect, but it got me thinking.

Then I noticed that two spammers I blocked a couple days ago no longer have accounts. Twitter seems to be doing something about spammers.

Next I found the Stop Twitter Spam blog, which tracks and explains much of what Twitter is doing to fight spammers. That got me thinking even more.

Could we somehow take advantage of our network to help Twitter find and eliminate spammers even quicker? I'm not the most technical guy in the world, and I'm writing this minutes after the idea occured to me, so bear with me, and brainstorm with me in the comments if you've got a good idea yourself.

#twitspam If we were all to make a habit of collecting names of spam follows, and tweeting them with the hashtag #twitspam, that'd give the folks at Twitter a bunch of fast feedback. I'm @mbalara and I'll be posting spammers on the #twitspam hashtag starting now.

@twitspammers The #twitspam hashtag could generate plenty of noise; not so good. The user @twitspam myteriously exists already, but hasn't updated. What if we were all to dm the "@twitspammers" user, and any names that turn up more than 10 times would be dm'ed to @ev? The details of getting this working are beyond me, but I've reserved @twitspammers. Anyone out there capable and willing to get something like this working? @ev, what are your thoughts on this?

TwitSpam the blog Somebody's already been thinking about this, and started the TwitSpam blog. But considering the nature of Twitter, it seems sort of backwards (not to mention laborious) to send a mail to a guy who then copies the spammer's names and posts them on a blog where we'd all have to go and look at them, find the user on twitter and then block them. What if the @twitspammers user could automatically tweet lists of names once a day to all followers?

These are just my quick thoughts on this, but I remain convinced that we could do something together to shut down spammers fast enough that they might even give up. What do you think?

Comments

[Jon Bounds]

Like the concept. Twitter could do something without us really though, if a certain percentage (50, 40?) of users followed by a twitterer blocked them then twitter could suspend the account?

[Cousin Cayce]

Agree wholeheartedly, but honestly the easiest and most point-a-to-point-b solution is for Twitter to add a "block damned spammer" link next to the normal "block". That way they get all the info they need to do something about it and do not have to rely solely on metrics and programs to figure out who the spammers are.

I mean, we could create a scriptlet that adds such a link and submits to an app that stores and manages the list of spammers a'la spamhaus project, but then what do we do with the data? Forward it to @ev?

Better for them to provide us with a manner of specifically identifying spammers to them, and let them manage the deactivations.

[Stop Twitter Spam]

One of the challenges of reporting spam as you have described it is that the spam reports are very public and there will always be people who are in a gray area - i.e. not clearly a spammer but pushing the envelope - who will get very upset that they are being called out as a spammer. Then all of the energy gets directed towards explaining why they were identified as a spammer, debating the algorithm that was used to classify them as a spammer, etc. I'd rather see a simple 'This is a spammer' checkbox added to the Block button. This would allow people to quietly report a spammer and block them in two clicks. I'd also like to see Twitter add a 'report spammer' function to their API. Many of the utilities that have been built around Twitter filter out a lot of spam. Wouldn't it be great if these 3rd party app's could take the results of that filtering and send a message back to Twitter with the ID's of the spammers?

[Steve Lawson]

I've been saying for ages that Twitter should instigate a 10:1 maximum following to followers ratio - if you want to follow 1000 people, you got to get at least 100 to follow you. If that doesn't stop them, try 5:1 :)

At least it would mean that nobody would suddenly appear on twitter following 40,000 people and jamming up the server just to improve their SEO.

Steve

[Matt Balara]

@jon & @steve: I found out plenty about what Twitter's doing about it on the Stop Twitter Spam blog. They've instituted limits, which will definitely slow spammers down. And they seem to be shutting them down pretty quickly too, based on their retweeting habits. My idea is to just help them do it quicker if possible.

@STS: yep, great idea. I'd make it an extra link, "@name is a spammer" and then you get 'em blocked and Twitter notified in just one click. And you're right of course: twittering about spammers could lead to witch hunts. But if we work out some sort of limit - @twitspammers forwards a name only after receiving it at least 10 or 20 or however many times - that should keep the "I'm annoyed with you" revenge finger-pointing to a minimum I reckon.

Another idea: @twitspammers tweets followers only "New spammers posted" with a link, and posts names directly to a blog with a "block" link next to every posted name, as on the TwitSpam blog. Not for the first time I wish I was a kick-ass coder and could hack this together myself. Any takers?

[gregorylent]

i think machines are doing it, or are involved ... many of the names such as rita1962 lead to the same site

easier to ignore spammers on twitter than email prior to gmail

the amazing thing, someone can feel pride, coming home to his/her family ... hi honey, it was a great day, i spammed 20,000 people today. right up there with master of the misspelled link site squatters.

it is really just another example of people's fear of lack