Nor is it the blog post I had intended to write about Twitter. Lisa Barone (@lisabarone), Chief Branding Office of Outspoken Media posted this on her blog today, and I think it’s a rather important post.
“I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but Twitter is infested with bots. Dirty, dirty, bots!
“For the past couple of weeks, the Twitter spam bots have been out in full force, often hitting accounts with handfuls of new cleavage-baring followers per minute. There’s been a lot of conversation about it on Twitter and lots of complaints things are spiraling out of control – but that’s all been from users. With so many folks complaining about the rise in Twitter bots and Twitter spam, I can’t help but think we haven’t heard much from Twitter. Where are they and what are they doing about it?”
A few weeks ago, I started to see accounts follow me on Twitter with very suspicious tweets and biographies. The accounts had strange names, often including a location, like “@OMG_boise”. The bio would mention a few locations and appeared mostly normal, but the tweets appeared to be random English words. Sometimes they were actual sentences, and sometimes they looked like a response to a human’s first name. But they were clearly some kind of bot, or at best, tweets being posted via Amazon Mechanical Turk. But what I wasn’t seeing was links, either in the profiles or the tweets. They just looked like noise.
On Monday, February 14, 2011, that changed – they started to tweet links. So far, I’ve seen four domains, and I’ve sent Twitter a list of the domains. Twitter seems to be cleaning them up – most of the accounts actually tweeting the links have disappeared from Twitter Search. In any event, this seems to be insidious behavior – automatically following people in the hopes that they’ll follow back and mostly tweeting nonsense – but hardly the sort of thing that could really hurt Twitter in the same way as what Lisa describes. But if you’re still using some kind of automatic follow-back tool, this is one more reason to stop!
The same cannot be said for another form of spam that’s infesting Twitter. Twitter’s Trending Topics are more or less unusable, because as soon as a trend emerges, spambots jump on it. often on multiple trending topics! This kind of spam is particularly vicious because it interferes with two of Twitter’s three advertising tools – Promoted Trends and Promoted Tweets.
So let’s crowdsource this! If you have some spare time while you’re in Twitter, click on a Trending Topic or two, and if you see tweets with multiple Trending Topics and links, do a “Block and Report for Spam” on the account. At some point, I’m sure Twitter will figure out an algorithmic way to do this, but in the meantime it’s a start.
One final note: individual account blocking with the “Block and Report for Spam” button appears to be the only mechanism available for users to report spam to Twitter! Yet for both types of spam I’ve described – the tweeting of specific domains and co-opting Trending Topics – a simple Twitter Search will deliver a list of spammy tweets. I’d like to see an email address for Twitter where we could send those search queries, rather than having to crowdsource spam block / reports one tweet at a time.
So what was the blog post I intended to write about Twitter? It was about the leaked video tutorial for advertisers on how to use Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets, and how bullish I am on Twitter’s advertising model as a result of reviewing the video in its entirety – twice. Twitter – Lisa is dead on here. You’ve got a great shot at being a superb advertising platform if you can clean the garbage out of Twitter Search and Trending Topics.
Update: Here’s a guide from Erik Deckers on “10 Signs for Spotting Twitter Spammers.” Happy crowdsourcing!
Update 2011-02-24
Twitter seems to have cleaned up most of the first kind of spam – the “word salad” spammers. A search for the domains that were using them is now turning up empty at any rate. However, I did see this rather curious set of tweets from Twitter’s Taylor Singletary (@episod) yesterday:
Hashtag spam, on the other hand, continues unchecked. As noted in my tweet above, there’s one particular hashtag – “kcabwollofmaet#” spelled backwards – that seems to be part of a well-orchestrated campaign to boost follower counts, possibly tied into some Twitter applications. I did a Twitter Search for this hashtag using the “History.pl” function in Project Kipling, then did plot of tweets per minute from the data. As noted in my tweet above, over 90,000 accounts are spamming using this hashtag, some with as many as 119,000 followers! Twitter’s search returned 643,000 tweets!
Those numbers were shocking to me – 90,000 spam accounts and peaks of over 200 spam tweets per minute! Why is Twitter spending the disk space, RAM and processor cycles to index this junk?
