You know you’ve made it as a communications medium when you start attracting spammers. On Twitter, the problem is getting bad enough that the service is starting to blacklist people who spam other members. There is already an unofficial site called The Twitter Blacklist that lists 329 known spammers on the service (see screen shot below). That has nothing to do with Twitter officially and is just a public service.
But Twitter also has its own official blacklist. It is not clear how you get on it, but perhaps if you are blocked by enough members you get inducted. Jesse Stay explains:
Before today, Twitter would mark accounts as “spam”, but not tell the owners of the accounts they marked them as spam. Those owners of the accounts could follow others, but no one was able to follow them, and there was no way for the owners of those accounts to know they had been blacklisted.
But now Twitter is simply suspending the accounts of people it considers spammers, but it will notify them. According to a discussion on the Twitter Development mailing list:
We’ve been considering this issue here at Twitter HQ, and we’re planning on simply removing the accounts of users who have violated our Terms of Service, as opposed to freezing their account as we’ve done in the past.
I just hope Scoble isn’t on that list. Taking away his Twitter would devastate him, especially after the whole Facebook banning incident.
Yay!
good to hear
Hmm. We could block Scoble, just to check your theory…
Maybe he will be thankful for the massive amount of free time ;o)
Final-freakin’-ly! Twitter Blacklist FTW!
Obviously not a full list, scoble isn’t even on there.
oh sweet poetic justice. Although, twitter is great that you can’t get spam really unless your following someone, except for @messages i suppose.
great work Twitter!
Nice, thanks for the post! Supposedly “BritneySpears” is following me…
NO MORE SCOBLE?? SWEET!
Thank god (or cheesus)
Nice step .. would reduce the load on the servers i suppose.
Wow! Great post, thanks!
I think that’s great. its bad enough we get spam via email, telephone, sms, the last place we want it is on twitter and other social networks.
go twitter!
@danielvrsola / cto / currie computers, inc.
Yeah, the brouhaha over the NoahDavidSimon and his 21 troll aliases kind of pushed them into forming some sort of policy.
Notable that all of the accounts were deleted as of today.
Is @panopticons abusing the Terms of Service:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/562ty5
What’s Twitter’s Stance Toward Abuse?
http://preview.tinyurl.com/3zdmj5
Apparently, this is the end of the world as we know it and we should all alert our Congress-critters if one is to believe @prokofy in the above Twitter Help threads.
@6 - actually, the biggest spam method on Twitter is people who follow 10,000+ random strangers. You get an e-mail when someone follows you, so people click-through…
With this, they’ll be blocked quickly.
Wish Twitter would institute a maximum-follows-per-day limit or something, though.
About a month ago Twitter added a way to do a ’spam request’ on this Help page: http://help.twitter.com. From that page, click on ‘Submit a Request’ and then select ’spam request’ from the drop-down box. Twitter reviews the account and then decides whether or not they should take action against the account. From what I can tell, the actions can vary. For example, on one account that I reported, they removed it from the public timeline and removed their follow/unfollow privileges but the account was not terminated. FYI - from my experience it takes Twitter a couple of weeks to review the account and take action, so don’t expect any immediate results.
“I just hope Scoble isn’t on that list.”
I dunno Erick - have you ever followed Scoble on Twitter? I couldn’t handle it.
I hope Twitter has a better algorithm than twitterblacklist.com. The ratio is not really important, it’s the content and behavior. After all, @scoble says being a follower is more important than being followed. If you don’t want to follow someone, don’t click through the email, it’s that simple. Then block only those who are abusing the service.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to not tell them, and just have their messages go into some null box? That way, they think they’re sending out all this junk and don’t know no one’s getting it. If they are told, they’ll just make another free account, but stop short of getting it blacklisted, knowing they will get a message if they send too much.
Ha ha, can you imagine? What would Scoble do if there was no outlet for his word salad?
Now if TechCrunch would just blacklist twitter spam.
Scariest part is about evasdropping and corporation stalking project… Did you know some blogging groups, major publications, companies, and corporations blacklist Techcrunch?
This is why I get spam email after login on Techcrunch.
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Define “abusing the service”
(1) Reportedly, one mommy blogger (and former journo) was blocked by Michael because she teased him about getting scooped — in an @ comment.
(2) I’m pretty sure I’ve been blocked by a high profile Twit because I challenged an opinion, using an @ comment. I don’t remember “un-following” but those tweets don’t show up anymore.
In neither case would a normal person call either of these @ comments “abuse” — they were one-of’s AND not personal attacks.
in re: #14, quite a few of the linkfarming follower types seem to have “squidoo” website addresses in their bios. So now I block anyone with them as an address, just to save time.
BTW, Scobleizer isn’t a spammer. He’s just chatty. Don’t like it? Don’t follow.
Calacanis and Pirillo are other people who send a lot of updates, too, but for some reason Scoble gets yelled at.
Of the three, at least Scoble usually responds to readers who write him
thats real good to hear
One thing I have noticed is that either Twitter is flaking on sending new follow messages, or some clever black-hats have figured out how to use the API to do follows without triggering a notification email.
The structure of Twitter still prevents you from being subjected to unwanted DMs, but it does not protect against unwanted @ replies (which, depending on your settings, can trigger additional SMS costs). So yes, some sort of formal policy against spam was necessary.
I’m surprised it took them this long. Spammers usually latch on to something like that pretty quick.
Now, does anyone want to hear about my system where you can work-at-home selling v1@gr@ and make a six-figure income in your spare time?
I need to see if I can get a list of those I detected as being “blacklisted” by Twitter from my socialtoo.com script. I can give you a pretty good list from that of exactly who Twitter is blocking (and probably now has suspended their accounts). Stay tuned to http://staynalive.com and I’ll post a follow-up with more details as I find them (hopefully tonight).
#25 (lux) I noticed that, too. It’s possible they just don’t send updates immediately. What I do to check who’s followed me recently is to go to
http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/ and then look up only followers. My pool is still small enough that I can figure out who’s new from that.
Doesn’t the basic functionality of twitter have an anti-spamming feature built into it? Why do we need to have “blacklists”. If you think someone is spamming, and you don’t want to see their updates, don’t follow them. It’s that simple. This would eliminate all the gray area of whether something is to be considered spam or not, and therefore worthy of a blacklisting.
This is a social service people, let the community decide on their own!
Alex, the problem from before was that spammers could still follow you, even though there was no possible way for you to follow them (since Twitter had “blacklisted” them). These guys were getting away with harvesting links and info without your permission. Now at least we know Twitter is taking a proactive stance to remove them entirely.
EVERYbody is a ’spammer’, more or less to some degree than others.
Alex, they’re potentially a drag on the system. They’re just there to linkfarm. If I load up something like tweetwheel, and it hits some loser following 26,000 people, that’s going to seriously degrade the speed of the tool. Multiply that by the 2-3 dozen spammers I’ve blocked in the last couple of weeks (and I’m virtually unknown, relatively), and you begin to see it ruins things for everyone. What do you want to bet some of the service failures we’ve had are because of extra demand due to these?
They’re parasites trying to get money for nothing, at the expense of the commons. Barnacles on ships reduce their efficiency; it’s called biofouling (look it up sometime). I can’t think of a catchy name for what these people do, but it aggregates to denial of service for the rest of us.
The whole point of twitter for companies like TechCrunch is TO spam people. That’s why you have a FOLLOW button and a REMOVE button. You control the spam. Works like MAGIC.
@ 31
Jesse, that makes sense, people using twitter as a convenient tool to steal content. I didn’t think of it like that initially.
BTW, i find it ironic that i found out about this post because i am following tech crunch on twitter…
While I was posting that, socialm______ and mrachi_______ followed me. Blocked.
Finally, we can rid the world of spammers… YES!
and visit http://www.topdouchebag.com while you are at it! Thanks1
Hutch Carpenter’s got it. Just read Trackback #2 above.
Yeah, they need to delete all accounts associated with this email - pleasantcreature@gmail.com. They all have one post - “contact me at pleasantcreature@gmail.com“. That person is a squatter.
What is the probability that there will be atleast one post about twitter in a day ? You put too many post about twitter. It’s like techcrunch is the twitter for twitter app updates
You can thank me later. *wink*
Your post headline is misleading. Twitter is not blacklisting tweeters…yet. The Web site you refer to assumes that spammers follow tons of people and have a small number of followers. The ratio used is causing some tweeters to be flagged as spam by Google unfairly. One example is twitter.com/FlypeClub, an experiment of sorts run by a real human. Because of the ratio, its been indexed as spam. What is being called “spam” on twitter isn’t truly spam… tweets from people you don’t follow aren’t in your time line. It’s your CHOICE to click through to the url listed in their profile. More disturbing to me is that someone has inequivalent decided what twitter spam is (the ratio) without thought of the consequences or a way for people to object to being flagged.
Arrington is paid to cover twitter. I mean seriously who gives a fuck about this twitter spam EVERY SINGLE DAY.
I’m going to go read duncan riley’s “offering” instead where its not a twitter or gtfo circle jerk.
Michelle, I didn’t say anything about the Twitter ratio in my post. I agree with you - the ratio should not be what they base it off of. Twitter is an individual experience and it should be the individuals that determine who is a spammer and who is not.
Michelle (#43), if you re-read the post and follow the link to Jesse Stay’s post you’ll see that Twitter is indeed terminating accounts that violate the TOS. They (Twitter) are getting spam reports from people every data and they’re also looking at accounts that have a high degree of block activity. All of that is completely separate from the Twitter Blacklist, although I suspect that there is a lot of overlap between the accounts that Twitter is acting on and the ones that are showing up on Twitter Blacklist.
Jesse Stay, Mike D: I appreciate the correction. I can go blind with angst when I see how easy it is for a person unleash an algorithm based their idea of what spam is. Of course, ultimately this makes me just as bad as the site I’m complaining about, hm? Thanks for listening to me rant. =)
A few good ideas in the comments, but there’s a problem with a twitter follow limit.
I evaluate every person that follows me, and if they’re human and cool, I follow them back. Sometimes it could take a couple weeks for me to get to it, which means I may add a hundred or so people on one day.
If I’m limited to say 20 follows a day, that’s going to really make me get backlogged - even worse than I am now (currently have 103 follow notifies that I haven’t checked yet).
And the gents talking about the overload have a great point. All in all, the twitter spammers have to be deleted, but in some way that they can’t come back or becomes a total waste of time.
Honestly, I thought the posting void was genius. It doesn’t add any load to the servers. They might also consider a follow void - where they can’t follow anyone, but they think they’re following people because they just get fed the public timeline.
Their follow number would get incremented when they add someone, but they won’t actually be following that person in reality. It’s like a twitter sandbox.
Outright deleting their accounts won’t work. It saves them too much time.
This kind of messes with tools like twitturly that are actively trying to block spam that goes through the tools, On twitturly we now go through every single tweet that a user makes and decide if the user is a spammer or not. If they are we don’t count their vote on whatever URL they just posted to twitter, and if they are not we count them.
The issue is that if they are deleting the accounts, then when we go and try to analyze the new account, we won’t have much to go off of and it makes it much harder to determine if it is a spam message or not. Dropping the account into a void was a much better solution.
I GOT BLACK-LISTED
i was just trying to catch Scoble in number of friends and i get black listed.
this is so unfair, the system is sooooo flawed. i never spammed anybody, it didn’t even occur to me to spam and yet these REAL IDIOTS are calling me a “stupid spanner”!!!