Twitter Refines the War on Spam

Today Twitter blog discusses the new measures the team is taking to fight spam on Twitter. Many of us have noticed that spam on Twitter is growing into a more and more acute problem. We have also recently seen cases of very malicious ways to use Twitter when you can actually have your PC infected by a virus if you are not careful enough about what links you click. So it now looks like the Twitter team has fully acknowledged that and has finally figured out how to fight it in a more transparent and (hopefully) more efficient way. So today we see them explaining how exactly the war on spam will be waged leveraging both efforts of the Twitter team and those of the users.

The first news today is that Twitter has launched a new admin tool to more efficiently detect spam accounts and identify them as such properly to notify other users. What happens when the support team spots a spam account on Twitter, is that they can suspend this account and change the content on the page to add text “This account is currently suspended and is being investigated due to strange activity” so that anyone who gets a follower notification from this user or otherwise arrives to the profile will immediately see that something can be wrong with this account. Twitter has also explained to the users what exactly can be considered spam on Twitter so I think anyone heavily engaged in Twitter for self-promotion should keep these basic attributes in mind.

Since the new tool has only been launched today I don’t think we should expect many suspended accounts already but I have done a quick search on Google to see if this is already in place. My search returned 15 suspended accounts with the following characteristics (should anyone be interested):

The majority of the accounts share one thing is common (exactly what you would have expected): they follow a huge number of people with only a handful following them back. Otherwise the accounts are quite different with some of them featuring 0 or only a handful of updates while others have sent thousands of updates. Bios on some of the accounts actually look like legitimate bios of clever marketers selling their stuff on Twitter but they must have gone way too far in their activities.

The suspended accounts can not be followed them so until the investigation is completed they can not harm anyone else either with updates or in any other way. One of the accounts that I found in the search results (and definitely indexed by Google as having the suspended text) already shows the “That page does not exist!” message so it must have already been deleted by the team.

What is interesting about the suspension tool on Twitter is that it actually takes into account the community opinion about this or that account so the more users block it, the higher chances it will be suspended.

To make the spam war efficient Twitter is actually going to have dedicated full-time personnel working exclusively on identifying and suspending/deleting spam accounts. The first person is already starting on Twitter next week. I imagine it will not be the most exciting of jobs but after all someone will have to do the housecleaning on Twitter and not everything can be automated.

Unfortunately even with this serious approach to eliminating spam on Twitter they can’t promise it will be totally eliminated (and that’s understandable). But at least it’s good to see actions taken to prevent spammers from hurting too many people.

There’s also one thing about Twitter handling spam as well: why they have chosen to use the blocking functionality (which can be used for a whole variety of reasons when I just don’t want to see this or that particular person around while this person may be a completely legitimate community member who I personally dislike) instead of adding a small link to “report spam” right within the account so that users could alert the team on suspicious activities voluntarily. But probably once the community is educated about the new anti-spam practices on Twitter, they will make it as a next logical step.