Twitter Has Been Officially Fighting Spam for a Week. Results?

Last Thursday Twitter officially announced its war on spam on the microblogging service and provided some details on what measures would be implemented. Basically they hired a dedicated person to track accounts engaging in suspicious activities, suspending and reviewing these accounts to either completely remove or restore if the account owner is found to be not guilty. One of the metrics used is the number of Twitter users blocking this or that particular users (I suggested that Twitter should have a “report spam” functionality instead but that’s only my opinion).

Last Friday I conducted a Google search for suspended accounts and found 15 of them with one account already deleted (which must mean the investigation proved the account owner is guilty of spamming other users with unwanted updates or direct messages or can otherwise be qualified as spamer). So today I have decided to revisit those suspended accounts again to see how they were processed and also take a look at how many other accounts have been suspended over the week.

First let’s take a look at those accounts suspended last time we checked:

As you can see from the table above, out of the 15 accounts suspended as of last Friday (i.e. the very next day the war started) with one of them already deleted completely, we only see one more account deleted. But to my surprise one of these 15 accounts has actually been restored and the user seems to be pretty active already again - 40 new people followed, 27 new followers and 21 new updates. Unfortunately the user has not shared any details on the restoration process in any of the 21 new updates but anyway it kind of proves that Twitter is ready to admit mistakes and correct them letting the users back in.

This information proves two facts:

1. If your account is suspended but the investigation shows you do not meet the criteria for spam on Twitter, you still have a chance of having the account back.
2. The investigation must be taking quite a long time with only one account out of 14 suspended was deleted additionally during this week.

Next I conducted the same Google search for the text that you find on suspected accounts to see the current stats on suspended accounts. My findings:

Suspended accounts - 253

Deleted accounts - 5

Restored accounts - 9

Some of the suspended accounts looked pretty innocent, others were porn or sex-related with others yet using names of various celebrities for their nicknames - exactly what you would expect to view as spam, I believe.

One of the suspended accounts kind of disappointed me since this one was the person that was the first to ever follow me on Twitter - and even though we never actually talked with the account owner, I decided not to un-follow her to kind of commemorate my first day on Twitter. But I guess when your bio reads “Goal: Have everyone as a friend!!!” you are almost doomed to be suspended sooner or later.

Another suspended account probably also had a good reason to do it since the account owner claimed “Raising $1 Million for Breast Cancer Research” and I believe such fundraising cases on Twitter really should be investigated to make sure people raise money for what they claim.

As you can see from the results of my small investigation, Twitter team definitely takes a long time to investigate issues with suspended accounts because the vast majority of them remains suspended without any action on them. But it is also good to see that it is absolutely possible to have your account restored - it takes contacting the team about the issue so this must speedy up the process a lot given the fact that only 5 accounts have been deleted while 9 of the suspended accounts have been restored back to normal.

Another thing worth mentioning is that the number of suspended accounts is tiny compared to the total number of Twitter users: right now TwitDir reports 2,606,075 users with public profiles and of course two and a half hundred of suspended accounts are barely noticeable compared to this huge figure. But unfortunately chances are this is not because there are no spammers on Twitter (or only small number of them) - it could very well be a result of the team relying on users blocking spammers so it takes time and engagement to track suspicious accounts down. Probably if they added functionality to user profiles for other users to easily report spam, the number could be much higher (honestly, if I get a following notification from a person with a spammy-looking account, I will simply not follow the person back and I will not even consider the possibility of blocking this or that user unless he or she constantly annoy me on Twitter).

Anyway it has been very interesting for me to see the progress of the anti-spam war on Twitter but it would have been even more interesting to hear some updates on the actions from the team itself - hopefully they will be willing to keep us in the loop of anti-spam progress.