Twitter Spam: What Can We Do?

guest post by Matt Balara

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?