Turning Up The Heat On Spam
Twitter is not in the inflatable boat business contrary to this week's flavor of spam. Despite the fact that there are apparently lots of "surprisingly attractive" inflatable boats available for financing, these updates and other spammy accounts are unwanted junk affecting good user experience. Inflatable boats will sink as we work to fry all forms of Twitter spam. So, what are we doing?Suspended Accounts
Today, we launched a new admin tool which allows us to more efficiently deal with spam when we spot it. Our support staff can now more easily review and suspend spam accounts as well as visibly change the content on the profile to read, "This account is currently suspended and is being investigated due to strange activity," so that others may be warned.
Community Powered Alerts
Suspending a spam account only works after it's already caused some damage. We have enhanced our admin tools to more accurately factor your feedback for a more timely diagnosis. When you block a spam account, we take note—when more people start blocking a spam account, we go to red alert. Blocking also puts that account out of sight and out of mind so you don't have to see it anymore.
Dedicated Personnel
It's unfortunate that this has to be done but we're going to hire people whose full time job will be the systematic identification and removal of spam on Twitter. These folks will work together with our support team, and our automatic spam tools. Our first "spam marshal" is starting at Twitter next week.
As always, fighting spam is a sustained activity. There is no magic wand we can wave or switch we can flip to make it all go away. Spammers will keep finding inventive new ways to advance their motives and harm user experience and we'll keep shutting them down and slowing their progress. We just wanted to make sure everyone knows that we are taking spam seriously.
48 Comments:
Glad to know you're doing more to combat spam. I found it particularly annoying this week. I wish when I block a follower, there was a check box I could use to tell you why. Most but not all accounts I've blocked belong(ed) to spammers.
It's exciting to see you guys move up on catching spam on Twitter. Good luck! :)
This is incredibly good news. Thank you for protecting the consciousness of your subscribers from solicitation and unabashed attention whoring.
Thanks :)
The spammers that add me usually refers -at least- one spamm site in their updates. Maybe you can filter updates that links to these sites. Just a thought...
API, API, API. Please add a way to pull my block list (with my auth) to the API. Wordpress may have built in spam blocking, but people still use Akismet/Defensio.
I block them all, but it always asks for action, action is time. I have to read a mail, have to click to see who it is en have to block it when I recognize it as spam, I do this now already for months sometimes 6 times or more a day.
I know it will stop when I "lock" my account, but I want tot have an open account!
Can't you act faster, for example when someone follows a lot of people and isn't followed bij a large amount?
Great news! Keep Twitter for the people.
try to do it faster. I do not want to "lock" my account, but it takes a lot of actions (and time) to block those accounts over and over again.
It really annoys me
Good to hear you're working on the problem. By the way,I'd make an awesome Spam Marshal. Do you hire off-site employees?
I'm going to miss learning about inflatable boats. :-)
Great! Knowing that when I block someone you get a red flag really motivates me to do so!
Good job guys! It's a sad world we live in but I'm glad you're up to speed and really devoted to make it harder!
Keep it up!
Good news and thanks for the update! Nice to know that our few mouse clicks (to block spammers) are now making a difference!
Well done. I cannot fathom why spam exists at all. It's one of life's great mysteries. Does anyone understand the point of it?
Best wishes and keep up the good work.
Cheers
Please consider my idea presented over at Get Satisfaction titled Twitter spam mitigation via SURBL applied to young Follow ratio inequity accounts. Thanks!
Inflatable boats... rofl.
I am so happy to see you guys taking a proactive approach to nip those dirty spammers in their butts!
Have you thought about potential abuse of the community alerts? What happens if a bunch of people block a non-spammer account on purpose?
i want to be the Spam Marshall... it would be my first elected position...
not at all kidding
Thank you for working on this!
I would like to see a separate flag as spam button. One press, and you can toggle it, so if you press it on accident, you can undo it. It would be a lot faster than having to load two screens more after hitting block, and then confirming, and waiting for the next page to load to confirm.
We need some AJAX in this piece. :)
API controls for blocking and managing your block list, as well as email controls for blocking would be nice.
What about a privacy setting where others can still see our time-line, but can't become followers without our permission? I'd turn this on all of the time on all accounts. Then I can block spammers in bulk. (check-marks, and block)
Excellent work on addressing this quickly - great work!
You have my loyalty. It's just a part of web-biz even though it's annoying. Spammers do their thing but we'll keep twittering fo sho!
What do you mean Tweet spam? That's pointless like Video spams...
I too had to block 5 new followers this past week. It was obvious they were spammers.
Glad to see Twitter Personnel is paying attention.
I wanna be a "spam marshall" when I grow up...where do I apply?
Maybe you could try integrating with http://mollom.com/ and flag accounts that post tweets that get tagged as spam by mollom
You should note that the spambots tend to be following tens of thousands of people.
THere's probably a script invovled in that and therefore a user following a large number of people in a short space of time should = spam :)
Spam is (sadly) everywhere these days, these are great news!
"Blocking also puts that account out of sight and out of mind so you don't have to see it anymore."
Biz thanks for being pro-active in tackling the spammers that have come out of the woodwork lately. However, unless something has changed in the last day or so, you will still see the replies of users you have blocked, if you search for your replies with Twitter Search (formerly Summize). I know because my replies were regularly littered with 'replies' from one particular blocked troll.
So while I applaud Twitter's going after spammers, I wish you'd go after the users that are only here to drop f-bombs on other users and be as much of a nuisance as possible. These users pollute the entire Twitter community, and ruin the experience for everyone.
Most but not all accounts I've blocked belong(ed) to spammers.
Thanks twitter people for all your hardwork!
I can only imagine the amount of spam twitter has to manage. I have a small forum that gets slammed all the time!
Is there anything that can be done about this sort of spam? http://performancing.com/monetization/monetization-through-twitter
It irritates me so much that these sort of people think they have a right to make money out of Twitter by using deceitful links to spam
Most Twitter users probably don't know they can report spam. The form to do so is hidden behind several links.
Feature request: Add a "report this account as spam" link on the block confirmation page.
Thanks for your response to the spam problem. It's already making a difference.
I really don't know if someone has already suggested it, so I am going to add my two cents anyway. Why not forcing us to give the permission when someone wants to follow us, just as in the case of people with protected updates? We should always have to ask people the permission to follow them, despite of this person having protected his updates or not.
thanks for keeping a sense of humor about the twitterbots, got great larf reading your post: "Twitter is not in the inflatable boat business contrary to this week's flavor of spam."
jeffs
Great news. It's such a shame that spam has made this kind of action necessary so thanks for meeting the problem head on.
Great. I wish there was more dedication to this throughout the internet.
Fight the good fight!
so glad to see you guys being proactive. I'll start visiting this site more! Although I would still love advice regarding facebook... my facebook account got disabled because I accidently clicked on a spam email I thought was from my friend. clearly if anyone looked at my account, they would see that it was 100% an accident.
Sounds like you are doing a great job, blocking spam. New to twitter and like it so far.
this is very common problem to handle spamer. But great care took to handle it. Most often the blogger lost their genuin user while handling spam
sounds like your doing a great job
its great
Instead of Spam Marshall, how about Spam Canner or Put Spam back in the Can, or Spam Fryer ? A lot of americans won't get that, but us English who love the real Spam fry it and eat it in sandwiches. I understand the Koreans love it as well, how do they eat it? Perhaps we can get a Korean expression out of this ?
Great news!
Hopefully it will work better than fb who marked many of us as spammers because of a virus in their system.
Thank you for taking care of us! Much appreciated!
Spammers Blow thank goodness you are doing something about it!
Pass my pagerank from my bio www link, I earned it.
Not cool of you to bend over for Google on this. When Google decides to nofollow all Blogger links, maybe have a leg to stand on. Even then though, don't forget who's creating all the content that makes our pagerank what it is.
I know you're fighting spam, but don't hurt us all in the process.
A flag as Spam button would be killer!!
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home