We’ve all received those emails, be it a poorly-English worded “Hello, my friend. How are you recently. I write tell you of big electrical bargains, reliable company” or the infamous “I write because you have good reputation. I wish to use your bank account to transfer $1,000,000 and you get give $10,000 for assistance”. Let’s face it, email spam is annoying and for the poor souls that fall for it, dangerous.
But what about Twitter spam?
I had never been spammed on Twitter before, so it never even occurred to me that such a thing existed. In hindsight I guess it was too good to be true. For yesterday morning when I logged in to the world’s favourite microblogging service, there it was:
Spam was already becoming an increasing problem on Twitter in mid-2009, according to this article from TechCrunch. Then in June this year itnews.com.au reported on a malicious spam attack, involving tweets containing a link to a website that self-installs rogue software on the user’s computer.
This video talks about what constitute Twitter spam:
Twitter itself is well-aware of the spam problem and says it is working hard to fight it. The service has strict rules to try prevent spammers. This graph, sourced from Twitter, shows the amount of spam as a percentage in the 12 months to February 2010 (although with the exponential increase in Twitter users, the actual number of spammers may have increased even if the percentage has decreased):
Computerworld questions whether Twitter is doing enough, and has itself demonstrated that identifying spammers can be done. The problem however is you find and block one spammer, then another takes its place.
The other battleground against spam is through third party clients. TweetDeck, for example has introduced a spam button which deletes the message, blocks the user and reports them to Twitter. Hootsuite also allows a spammer to be reported, but popular mobile client Echofon appears to be yet to follow suit.
Time will tell of the effectiveness of these measures – in the meantime, it looks like this annoyance will be with us for the foreseeable future.