How to Detect Twitter Spammers (’Spitters’)
It’s rather ironic that even I was targeted by spammers by these unsolicited “Follows” on my Twitter account. I don’t claim any fame on it, I don’t break news on it and is only a means of telling my contacts what I’m thinking about or doing. So, how does one tell if someone is a spammer?
A Twitter spammer, “Spitters” as I call them, don’t provide any value to the network, or yourself. It’s helpful to glean your Spitters from your followers so you realistically know who is genuinely interested in your Tweets (guerrilla broadcasts, so to speak).
I’ll pick my most recent follower, which I just blocked. They were following over 30,000 people and in return they obtained over 3,100 followers in reciprocity. Clearly, this is a bot and is trying to game the system so they can somehow get people to go to their Web sites.
The best way to detect a Twitter spammer is to look at their stats, located on the right side of their profile. If their following egregiously outweighs their followers, they are adding a mass amount of people to their network blindly.
My thoughts for Twitter – Twitter had many scalability issues in it’s infancy (outages), but please, preserving your network’s integrity is important. Please make it easier to report someone for spam, and use heuristics to prevent spammers from abusing your network. It’s your duty to your users as well as yourselves to ensure nearly all the accounts are genuine, real users if you expect to monetize it effectively.
What are your thoughts on ‘Spitters’ or Twitter?
I’ve noticed this happening a lot lately. The thing that gets me is that sometimes you can tell that it’s a real person doing the spamming, rather than a bot. How is Twitter going to say that anyone following a certain number of people needs to be banned? That’s a tough call.