When using the micro-blogging service Twitter, by default you get email notices whenever anyone signs up to “follow” you (when you follow someone on Twitter, their Twitter posts, or “tweets,” display on your main Twitter page, along with Tweets from everyone else you follow). A few weeks back, I noticed that I was getting inundated with new followers with names such as “moneymadman,” “getgooglewealth” and “make money online.” One of the charms of Twitter is that you only see tweets from the people you follow, therefore making Twitter a safe haven from spam. At least, that’s what I thought.
That inundation of new followers gave me insight into the world of “follower spam” on Twitter, which has been a growing problem since last spring for the nascent service. The way it works is that an online marketer sets up a Twitter account and then asks to follow hundreds of people, hoping that some small percentage will follow them and see their commercial messages — and then click through to buy a product.
While there is nothing illegal about this practice, it gets to be annoying for people who have to sift through their list of followers to see whether those people are spammers not worth following or colleagues they might want to follow. The growth of spam on Twitter has led to various community efforts such as the Stop Twitter Spam blog and the My Tweeple application to more easily monitor your followers.
Twitter itself has hired a “spam marshall” and is now looking for another spam engineer. According to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, the company has been shutting down accounts of users who follow large numbers of people with little reciprocation — the telltale sign of a follower spammer. (See this Twitter blog post explaining “spammy behavior” that raises red flags.) Stone told me Twitter would beef up its spam-fighting unit while working with the community to fight the problem.
“We have plans to grow our spam team and continue building out our tools for keeping the user experience as spam-free as possible,” he said via email. “We’ll certainly continue to welcome community feedback as an integral part of fighting spam.”
How It Started
There are two factors that helped give follower spammers a foothold on Twitter: 1) people get email notifications by default for each new follower; 2) some people like to reciprocate and follow everyone who follows them. The latter was the usual mode for social media strategist Tabitha Grace Smith, who had to change that behavior because of spammers.
“Before the spam blast of ‘6figure’ spammers, I just auto-followed everyone,” she told me via email. “But at the height of the spam nightmare I was getting like 20 requests a day from profiles that had one update…‘we’re making a bunch of money.’ So for a couple weeks I just didn’t follow anyone (it was too overwhelming). I also stopped my email notifications for new followers.”
Michael Doeff is a product manager for software company Avolent in San Francisco, and started the Stop Twitter Spam blog because of a follower inundation last March. He traces that spurt of follower spam to a screencast presentation done by Howie Schwartz, a “black hat” online marketer that does not play by Google’s rules in generating traffic. Schwartz is known for a program called Google Wealth Maker that automatically sets up Twitter pages and Twitter messages to populate pages that will be spidered by Google, thereby raising Google rank and search results pointing to your pages (in theory).
Doeff explained to me how someone like Schwartz would use Twitter to get attention and make money:
There is a general feeling that spamming through email, instant messenger, and MySpace is ‘played out’ and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter are thought of as virgin powder. There are a number of variations to how these spammers try to exploit Twitter, but their basic goal is to get Twitter users to pay attention to their Twitter profile page in an effort to get clickthroughs to their website.
They do this by following a large number of people, either randomly or based on some niche area (e.g. people who are dog owners). This mass following is sometimes done using automated ‘bots.’ Whenever they follow someone, an email is generated telling the followee that they have a new follower. This email alert can be turned off but it’s turned on by default. So in a way, the spammers are using the ‘New Follower’ email as a trojan horse because it allows them to get into their email inbox without getting caught up in a spam filter.
While Twitter was dealing with other serious issues earlier this year, such as network outages from massive traffic, users such as Doeff decided to help out with the spam problem. Shannon Whitley, a computer programmer in the San Francisco Bay Area, created My Tweeple so he could more easily see who was following him and whether they might be a spammer. The application gives you a better view of your followers — their stats, bio, and recent tweets — without you having to click through to their profile page. Plus, you can “ding” someone who is spamming and see who else has been dinged multiple times before choosing to follow them.
Whitley said that spammers haven’t been the only ones who have annoyed him on Twitter.
“I was followed by a white supremacist who had started to follow people just so that others would look at his tweets and view his hate speech,” Whitley told me via email. “I contacted Twitter about it, and while they did remove him from the public timeline, they did not delete his account. By following me, he had caused me to read his offensive words and I believe he violated Twitter’s terms of service. Twitter didn’t want to disable his account and responded that he had a right to free speech.”
There are now an array of marketers using Twitter to promote their businesses or to give better customer service responses. Some marketers are pushing the envelope with programs like Twitter Squeeze, which says it will help you: “Learn How to Quickly Generate a Massive Crowd of Followers Who Give You Cash When You Tweet!” However, the pitch clarifies that “Twitter Squeeze is not a spam technique, [and] it does not employ software to spam Twitter.”
When I received a free pass to check out this service, launched by marketer Rick Butts, there didn’t seem to be much more than videos and instructions on Twitter basics, along with a forum where marketers could follow each other to build up an audience.
The Howie Schwartz screencast, however, leads to a pitch for a “Micro-Blogging Automation” offer for $197 (and $49 per month) to get an automated Twitter account where they provide the content, links, and promotion for you. This clearly isn’t about creating a compelling Twitter experience. The pitch continues: “The LAZY way to make the top Web 2.0 sites work FOR YOU and bring you FREE Subscribers and FREE MONEY from affiliate and product sales everyday without lifting a finger.”
Of course, many of these money-making ideas end up making the most money for the people offering to do the promotion. I asked Twitter’s Stone how the company decides on who is doing legit promotion and who is crossing the line.
“Commercial accounts are welcomed on Twitter,” Stone said. “We encourage businesses or companies to send out messages to their followers…‘When is it legitimate for someone to follow a lot of people…?’ gets into the realm of disingenuous activities intended to abuse social aspects of Twitter — that’s when lines start getting crossed.”
How to Stop It
So if you are a Twitter user, how can you avoid spammers and other people with nefarious motives? Here are some basic steps to stop spam and report it to Twitter:
1. Block users.
When I queried my Twitter followers about how they dealt with spammers, they almost uniformly answered that they “block” anyone they find unsavory. You can block Twitter users by going to their profile page and clicking “block [user],” which will keep your feed from showing up on their list of people they follow or in their timeline of friend updates. Unfortunately, they can still request to follow you even after you have blocked them, generating an email alert if you have that function on.
2. Report the spammer to Twitter.
Now that Twitter has put more resources into fighting spam, you can contact them directly about taking down suspected sites, either via this contact form or by following a special spam account set up by Twitter. Once you are a follower, you just need to send a direct @reply to this account with the name of the spammer, like so:
spam moneymadman
3. Be careful who you follow.
The days of following everyone who follows you are over for Twitter. Now, it makes more sense to check out their profile or use a tool such as My Tweeple to preview a user before following them. “Now, I’m very cautious about who I follow,” said Tabitha Grace Smith. “If I see a ton of links — I don’t follow. Or if there’s only a couple updates. I still follow most of the people who request to follow me.”
4. Twitter limits number of follows.
One concrete step that Twitter did make was limiting the number of people you can follow on the service — depending on how many people follow you. At first, many bloggers misread the limitations, thinking they would be limited in how many followers they could get — rather than how many people they could follow. Twitter co-founder and current CEO Ev Williams wrote last August about the limits:
Our challenge is to curb this type of behavior without interfering with non-spammy users — some of whom may just be very enthusiastic followers. What is a reasonable number of people to follow, anyway? Most users may have a hard time finding 500 accounts they are interested in — while others would think a limit of 10,000 is too low.
5. Turn off email notifications.
If you grow tired of getting notifications from new followers who want to spam you, you can easily turn off all your email notifications. Just log into Twitter, and click on “Settings” and then click the Notices tab. Uncheck the box next to “New Follower Emails.” Of course, you won’t get emails when non-spammers follow you either.
Twitter also is considering adding a “report as spam” button on profiles, so that people can more easily report spammmers. There’s a long discussion on this topic at Twitter’s forum on Get Satisfaction, an online support site. You can also use this forum to report spammers or other problems with the service.
Doeff told me he hoped that social media sites could band together, along with their communities, to lessen the spam epidemic.
“This is an issue that is common to many social media sites such as Tumblr, FriendFeed, Facebook, Digg, etc.” he said. “I’d like to see some efforts for these companies to work together to tackle this issue. For example, if Twitter identifies a spammer, publish some info about that spammer (IP address, user ID, profile URL) to a database that could be checked by other services. I’d also like to see Twitter do more to leverage the efforts of the Twitter community in their fight against spam — i.e. provide the Twitter community with more tools to regulate the problem. This will become more and more important as Twitter continues to grow and gain mainstream adoption.”
What do you think? Have you been a victim of follower spam on Twitter? How do you fight it? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Photo of Biz Stone by Jennifer Woodard Maderazo.
UPDATE: I heard from Carrie Wilkerson, the new owner of Twitter Squeeze, and she was upset that I insinuated that her product “advocated and taught spamming techniques for Twitter.” While I never did say that in the article, she tried to clarify what Twitter Squeeze is:
The former owner, Rick Butts and myself, are big spam haters. We advocate wise following, good content and building up a list the right way…I have 2,600 followers on Twitter and have NEVER been spammed, even though I have an auto-follow policy.
Rick Butts, the original owner of Twitter Squeeze, backed up Wilkerson in a separate email to me:
My ‘service’ is no service at all. It is a series of videos showing how to ETHICALLY leverage the way people look into who you are so that they are more likely to follow you, by reducing the options they have on your BLOG.
In fact in the training I make it very clear that you want to keep the wrong kind of people from following you. Twitter Squeeze is all about increasing followers — every single thing I offer from that point on relative to USING Twitter is to not spam, not even close, but to build relationships — and market sparingly.
I agree that Twitter Squeeze is more of a training on how to use Twitter to market to people, but the language around the product does sound to me like a get-rich-quick scheme (even if that’s not what it ends up being). The Schwartz product, “Micro-Blogging Automation,” is much worse, labeling itself as “black hat” marketing and the profiles he created have been shut down by Twitter.
Great article Mark, I wish other social media sites would be as proactive as Twitter. One of the early signs of the demise of Myspace is when everyone got nonstop friend requests from indie bands who were hoping for friendbacks and free promotion. It’s a lame tactic and doesn’t work for 99% of spammers, though I’ve seen some that have done pretty innovative things with corporate brands.
Unfortunately Twitter is learning the hard way what it’s like to become popular.
Just as MySpace now has all the “wannabe glamor models and bikini webcam babes” asking to be your friend, Twitter has the spammers.
It definitely needs to look at the problem more in-depth and offer satisfactory solutions, or else it could lose many of its users. Which would be a shame, as it is one of the better social media apps out there.
Great read.
You would be interested to see a little experiment that I have been running on Twitter for several months.
http://www.twitter.com/RU4Real
Great post on a growing problem. I think putting Whitely’s “ding”-meter together w/ Doeff’s cross-service spam clearinghouse would be a good first step.
While the CAN-SPAM Act requirements of commercial emailers appears to be too narrow to cover these activities (http://snurl.com/4na4b), it’s probably the right framework as the “black hats” are basically using fake personas to cause Twitter to send an email that leads to a solicitation.
Didn’t realize PBS was so hip to the times. Thank you Simon for sending me the link here.
Excellent article. I find it amazing how many companies try to rationalize their link spaminess as “useful [related] information that you might never hear otherwise.” They completely ignore and don’t grok the interactive relationship aspect of the service in favor of profit, which is so anti-culture on Twitter. When will they learn?
Thank you for all the great tips on how to stop Twitter spam.
One problem with the report spam button it that some new accounts may look like spam because the people haven’t learned Twitter customs. I’ve had personal friends sign up and only make one or two posts and then go follow people before they were ready.
I have received a lot of Twitter spam but I wouldn’t call myself a victim. It’s easy to hit the delete button. If no one buys from a spammer, they will find other ways to do business.
whew !!
I’d rather just pick up the phone and tell my “people” where I am.
Mark,
Very well done and informative article. I am going to point my Realtor friends to this post. My friends Pat Kitano and Domus Consulting are running a webinar with twitter as a hub, centerpiece, to a strategy to combine groups that will “broadcast” valuable real estate information.
One of the biggest challenges has been twitter spam, understanding how to identify the right person or company to follow.
Thank you for this tool!
dean
Don’t forget that you can choose your followers on Twitter! Just make the account “protected” in prefs and then you get the chance to choose who gets to follow you. Sure, some spam requests come in, but they’re easier to ignore/block. The downside: you’re not part of the public timeline and don’t show up in Twitter Search results. Many upsides, including the ability to better tailor your communication to what you know about your followers, and you can be more revelatory because you’re not automatically publicly indexed.
I use a gmail filter to apply a label to all follow requests so they never hit my inbox.
How about adding content to the new follower notification. I’m unlikely to take time to check details on my followers if I start getting many per day (hasn’t happened yet).
Just a suggestion, add this info:
Spammers should be quickly identified if they only have one post and a small number of followers.
Having known Howie Schwartz for a while now, I almost feel obligated to defend him.
But I don’t think he cares. In fact, he probably gets a kick out of this article. Last I spoke to him, he openly admitted that he was (and I quote):
“Scraping the hell out of Twitter”
The thing about guys like Schwartz, is that no matter what kind of safeguards you put in place (such as the suggested “user ID, profile URL, or even IP address”) they will always find a way around it–more for the challenge than anything else.
Thanks for posting this article and adding to the “mystique…” of guys like Schwartz
Mark, thanks for this great article. There always seem to be some people who will take advantage, it’s frustrating, but commonplace anymore.
Twitter seems to be taking more and more steps to stop spammers — one value of a network.
Good advice though, I’d hate to see someone turned off of Twitter because of spammers. I always click on the URL in the twitter notification to see if it is someone I want to follow, not big on the auto-follow policy.
thanks alot for this great idea biz,good biz make good money and good make one happy.that fight is a good fight because so many bad guy on net.make money at http://www.moneyisgoodo.blogspot.com
Maybe one way is to use twitzu for promotion postings on your tweets: http://www.twitzu.com
Yes! It was inevitable. Just as many social bookmarking sites are now filled with spam or must constantly fight it with filtering and human moderators as we do at Linkatopia, Twitter was bound to become a target. I’m glad to see Twitter is actively doing something about it. Many of the other social bookmarking sites favored sheer numbers of members over having less spam in their database and have become pointless. It would be a shame for Twitter to become just another haven for spammers.
Can only begin to appreciate the task on the part of Twitter to help with this.. Unfortunately, though, I have seen two people in the comparatively few who follow me who were suspended, and I genuinely feel for them in that they *maybe* should not have been..
One came across as a genuine, possibly even extremely desperate Human/Freedom Rights activist who was expressing opinion with English as their second language.. The other came across as an overly exuberant young person who may have just gone click happy without knowing the possible consequences..
Special to Them :: I’ve kept them both as my followers meaning I proactively chose not to block them.. Am hoping that one day soon the Human factor intervenes and they reappear as actively tweeting if they were indeed purely speaking from the Heart.. :grin:
Best wishes to the Twitter folks as their platform has served tremendously for these Fingertips that are working with an ever increasingly limited cognitive functionality.. Many, many a day it’s been such a blessing to only face those 140 characters for advocacy self-expression as opposed to the unintentionally implied impression one must write a chapter in a book otherwise.. :wink:
Warmest cyber hugs from Talking Rock, Georgia.. :)
Twitter should have done this ages ago as it’s been a known issue for quite some time. Although I’ve recently gone back to them, I remember having to cancel my account because of all the spammers pinging off of me with no response to reports made to twitter. They could have handled this a lot better and a lot sooner.
I set up a filter in Gmail, so I don’t have to see notifications about followers, but I can still find them when I want. Appropedia sometimes gets 10 or 20 new followers per day, and I prefer to scan them at my leisure, and through the Twitter site, rather than getting them in my inbox.
I’ve had a small number of spammers and borderline cases following me, but I just unfollow them.
I must admit I do follow Twitterers that I’d like to connect with, hoping they’ll follow back – but it’s based on searching for relevant tweets (e.g. “#green”, sustainability, appropriate technology, wikis, transition-towns). I make a judgement as to whether I’ll be interested in them and vice versa. More than half eventually follow back, so it’s working okay.
I also respond to tweets, and put a lot of effort into being informative and thought-provoking, with solid info rather than the all-too-common fluff and “green consumerism”. That seems to get a lot of followers even when I’m not seeking anyone out, and I think that’s the opposite of spam.
It is very exciting to see the growth of regulation from the twitter team. Reminds me of the community moderation propped up after the second life hacks. I take the fact that spammers are trying to infiltrate and that the company is adequately combatting the threat as a good sign of growth. Look forward to more anti-spam efforts
Very legible article. Thanks for the hints. MyTweeple is really great to check out who you are socialized with. I feel sorry, that every good idea is just raped by spammers.
I have to disagree. There really is NO SUCH THING as Twitter spam, considering that you have to choose to follow someone to read what they write there.
I have not seen a way to use Twitter to send things to people who are not following you, which would be spam.
If people keep misusing the word spam, it will lose all meaning.
If you don’t like what someone says on Twitter, just unfollow them, but don’t falsely accuse them of spamming just because you feel like it.
Great article.
It’s ironic how picking friends that you want to here what they say can be perceived as spam. Perhaps another service should be the target since Twitter happens to be the one place I’m never spammed.
How it’s prevented
1. You pick who you want to follow (by you)
2. You can’t spam since they aren’t following you (by twitter
There is a check and a balance and I have to say that your reason is confusing and seemingly misguided to say the least.
With that said if anyone spams me I’ll simply do what others would do and that would be to quit following the person and then block them.
Though it may not your job to protect people from what they enjoy and to sensor perceived non-existent spam it’s good to know that your are looking out for people.
Respectfully stated, but If I was rating this blog post it’d get a 3 of 10 :(
Hopefully you won’t sensor an honest post and will let this objective post through.
Great read, however i have another problem on Twitter, i keep receiving status updates that say “Finally found the BEST way to get tons of followers for FREE! http://www.morefollowers.info” i wish i could block these status updates, but it appears as though i have posted it. In other words its a status update i have supposedly have posted – when i haven’t. Any solution to that? I’ve even deleted my account & opened another (with the same username and password – could that also be the problem. Help wanted ASAP as i’ve received no assistance from Twitter and my account was once suspended on twitter due to this hourly status updates.
Helpt
At TwitChuck.com we have been working on the Twitter spam issue for a while. Being a small shop we can implement tools and tracking mechanisms really quickly. We know that socializing the spam battle is really the only hope.
What if you’re getting spam from Twitter itself? I’ve never signed up but have started receiving notifications from followers. I can’t stop the notifications without signing up. I can’t complain or querie this without signing up. What’s that about?
They completely ignore and don’t grok the interactive relationship aspect of the service in favor of profit, which is so anti-culture on Twitter.
Thanks for your nice work.
Twitter isent anything?!?
That was a really interesting article. I love Twitter and I have only recently experienced the “spamming” effect which is really irritating. Someone sugggested http://truetwit.com/ which is a way of verifying your followers, which I used for aobut a week but found that a lot of my followers didn’t like it, so now I simply “block and report spam” using Tweetdeck.com and that’s seems to be doing the trick.
What i don’t understand is this. Once a particular URL has been identified with spam accounts why not block all tweets which contain that URL? Say the url is abc.bit.ly and it redirects to an evil bad Chinese porno site with malware or one of those google get rich quick scam sites.
If enough people flag enough positively identified spam accounts that have been spitting out a url then twitter should go into auto mode and essentially prevent any other tweets containing that url from being broadcast. I can’t imagine it would be that hard to code that sort of filtering algorythm. But I assume the sheer volume of spam accounts might prevent this from ever being implemented. And nothing stops the url from changing. Maybe they should partner up with longurl.org…
If that’s not possible they should have a mechanism for people to auto submit urls that are KNOWN to be dangerous. There is a growing trend of one tweet spam accounts following 200 people pointing to really bad malware sites.
I’m sure I’m not seeing the pitfalls of an auto solution but it’s getting so you can’t click on any links and you get a ton of followers that, well, you’d rather NOT have.
I have to agree on that what Maria said.
It would be so easy to avoid this spam.
You should email them and make this suggestion.
Great job my boddy. Great thing i think :)
Almost forgot, just thanks for great stuff.
Thanks for the post! I have the same problem with my twitter account, too. Every time i post something a few second later someonle is following me.
Goog Job! Twitter isent anything?
It seems that if Twitter incorporated an approval system for followers the problem would be eliminated. I know it would be time consuming, but it seems to work fine for Facebook.
Great article, very interesting. Thanks
Good work, very ineresting article. Thanks
great job
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I am writing this with regards join or not to with regards to the people who use this kind of spamming techniques and teach people to use on twitter. I am commenting to know if this kind of courses offered by the people are teaching legitimate techniques to be used in the twitter and this is allowed to be done. I want to know is it better to use these types of strategy or they are against the twitter policy as there are courses running out there on the internet what kind of steps does twitter takes against them for not running these courses or services as classed as spamming or allowed to be used on twitters network compared to natural growths.
I have found some of them the courses found on internet are they fine to be joined and used on twitter. What does twitter do about this strategies or techniques. Similarly there are many people who are selling these kind of service i want to know before joining are they classed as spam by twitter or allowed to be used on the twitter as legal course authorised by twitter for them to be allowed to be used.
These services are using twitter logo’s and other brand identities which looks like that twitter has endorsed these courses and allowed people to run these courses and used these techniques on their network. If this is not the endorsed courses from twitter then how come these people are allowed to run them and is there are any policy which twitter have that these people can be barred or can be reported or prosecuted.
Twitter spam has gotten so bad, it makes me not even want to participate. Everyday I am deleting followers. If you have your own small business it’s just too time consuming and not practical.
Great post, really interesting. Thanks
It’s because customers expect their conversations to be natural, just how they are in real life. Gathering customer feedback should be seamless and invisible to the customer. It is something support agents should be doing alongside their one-on-one support functions. Companies may even wish to build a knowledge base to answer frequently asked questions raised by your users @ http://helprace.com
Please help! I found this helpful but I have a serious problem that is not mentioned here at all. I have for the past 2 days ended up on the spammers list of accounts to follow. They set up 1000 accounts a night in China I think and all of those spam profiles follow me! I’ve changed password, deactivated all apps, no e-mail notification on for new followers, I don’t follow back – these are totally natural procedured. However, none of these will actually help me stop these massive spam follower accounts to follow me! The only thing I could do, was to lock my tweets. This is a sad solution as I work in comms and having locked tweets is simply not attractive for real world followers who might want to connect with me, who I like to connect and engage with. Please, pretty please help?
TWITTER DMer does not work! Please remove this from your list. You can login with a fake username and password and it will show you as logged in. I tested this out with my actual personal data and it never wound up sending any DMs. I have since changed my password for safety. Others should too.
Also, Social Oomph no longer provides auto DM for free, they now charge around $8 a month for this feature. This should not be listed as free on your list.
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