A simple Twitter spam rule
Feb 13th, 2012 by handolio
Twitter spam seems to be on the rise, anecdotally at least. In my experience the network’s spam falls into one of two camps. Spam followers are invariably female, have an unlikely sounding name and an attractive/revealing/slutty profile pic. Spam replies typically come from a similar profile.
It’s tricky to deal with the former. Any new user is likely to follow several other accounts and send a few messages before anyone follows them back, so it’s hard to say with any certainty whether a brand-new account is a spammer.
The latter is easy: if I’m not following someone, we’ve never messaged each other before and they send me an @ message containing only a shortened link; it’s spam.
It’s a simple and unfailing rule, which is why Twitter should impliment it, rather than relying on me reporting offenders.
