

Ask HN: Twitter spam: what's the purpose? - pmjoyce

Recently I've noticed an increase in the number spam tweets that link to my site and I'm not sure what the motivation is.<p>Are they simply trying to reduce their spam profile by linking to legitimate sites to make them less likely to flagged as spam by Twitter, or could there be something a little darker going on?<p>An example tweet is from twitter user @MZoASTEFUb:<p><i>"@jylan gonna stand there and watch me burn but thats alright...LOL JK, Im gonna stop drop and roll! itstheteenlife http://bl.inc.gs/xSC8B"</i><p>The bl.inc.gs link redirects to my site.  This was brought to my attention by the target of the tweet @jylan.<p>Any idea what might be happening here?
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devmonk
My guess is that it is either one of two things:

1\. Just link spam-testing or mixing legitimate-looking spam with
illegitimate.

2\. The plan is to use a delayed URL redirection change technique.

For example, in blogs, etc. you can change the link that your profile goes to
after the fact, so at first that "Nice post. Thanks!" comment and a link to
someone's legitimate blog via the poster's username seems innocuous. Later
after you ignore it, they change it to point at their spam site. Hoping you
don't notice. They can even change the link that their profile goes to only at
certain times of day if they wish and then back later, hoping you won't notice
and hoping that Google will pick up their spam link vs. the innocuous-looking
fake spam link.

By the same token, a URL shortener that could support changing the URL that
the shortened URL goes to could be used in exactly the same way. Even if
bl.inc.gs seems legit, there may be a backdoor (known or unknown) letting them
to change the URL that the shortened URL goes to.

~~~
pmjoyce
OK, this makes sense to me, thanks. The original link looks innocuous and so
is not marked as spam. After a period the URL redirect is changed to point at
a spam site but because the bl.inc.gs URL was flagged as OK it's now more
likely fly under the radar of Twitter's spam detection algorithm.

~~~
devmonk
Twitter, Google, and everyone else could do a much better job at handling link
spam.

They need a mixture of having users flag requests as spam (which many do),
analyzing all requests looking for trends in spamming (not just requests from
same route/IP, but that would be part of it), looking at users with similar
posts/tweets, etc. and then block the spammers. Easy enough, right? ;) Sounds
like whoever they outsource to needs to get on the ball though.

------
muyyatin
Probably what you said.

Or someone is trying to frame you.

~~~
pmjoyce
Seems like an inefficient way of framing me - going to one user at a time with
an obviously spammy account, so I doubt it's that.

