
Twitter spam and motivation to report it - yan
http://www.marco.org/2011/07/18/twitter-spam
======
sprsquish
I work on the Trust & Safety team at Twitter and hate spam as much as everyone
else. As with any large system the solution is never as simple as "implement
this thing, problem solved." As Marco points out, what is or is not spam is a
balancing act. Our head of Trust & Safety, Del Harvey, gave an interview to
the Guardian earlier this year about this balance:
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/07/twitter-
int...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/07/twitter-internet)

If you'd like to help us out we have several open positions on the team: Anti-
Spam: <https://twitter.com/job.html?jvi=oBPbVfwg,Job> Tools:
<https://twitter.com/job.html?jvi=oSbdVfwV,Job> Front End:
<https://twitter.com/job.html?jvi=owPbVfwb,Job>

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corin_
I get that Twitter want to be careful and not accidentally penalise legitimate
users, but nearly all spammers I get mentioning me fit the following points:

    
    
      - 0 followers (ok, sure, if they had to they could start making spambots follow each other to avoid this)
      - Account only just created
      - Has tweeted the exact same message, with the same link at the end, to 10s or 100s of people, in a very short space of time.
    

Are there really any non-spam usecases that would fit those points? Can't
these accounts just be automatically suspended?

~~~
pavel_lishin
The 3rd point might be a legitimate notification service, like ifttt (e.g., I
sign up for something that tweets a link to something to me whenever a page
with no RSS updates; if a hundred people sign up for the same thing, it would
look exactly like your third point.)

~~~
semanticist
That seems like an edge case - the first time they trigger the auto-
suspension, they'd just need to explain their service and get a 'not a
spammer' flag added to their account.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Heh, tell it to this guy: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2777942>

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hayley
I have a few bots of my own that do weather based alerts (by state). They
don't @reply anyone; they just do normal tweets.

What's so frustrating for me is how often I get slapped for spamming yet these
quite-obvious @mention spam bots continue to prosper (I can never get a
response out of twitter as to why I keep getting blocked; they just remove the
block without actually responding to anything I asked).

I get probably 10-20 @reply spam a day on my more active account and it all
follows the same pattern:

* account is nothing but @replies with just a link

This has been going on for probably a month and I've reported every single
account that's spammed me.

If twitter can't figure out how to auto-block this obvious spam, it doesn't
give me much hope that they'll figure out how to take care of spam in general.

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dolinsky
I've received mention spam in the past on Twitter, but last week it was used
against me as a primitive DoS attack on my account (a DoS on my time). In a
very short period of time after having tweeted something regarding the fallacy
of vaccines and autism, I started receiving @mention spam from a user who was
spamming all accounts that had RT'd my original tweet as well as me. Even if I
blocked that account, a new one would pop up immediately after that and it
effectively rendered my Mentions column in TweetDeck useless while this
'attack' was taking place.

It's nice to know that the accounts were quickly disabled but a more nefarious
individual or group could have caused even more problems, and it does seem
that Twitter should have some sort of prefiltering heuristics in place (if
they don't already exist) to prevent this kind of abuse (new account / low #
of tweets / low # of followers / consistent message 'n link being sent).

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jacobbijani
I'll still use the report as spam feature because it doubles as a block, which
is the only way to make the tweet go away.

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vobios
"Twitter needs a far more aggressive, automated, proactive, heuristic-based
anti-spam system. And if someone has trouble legitimately tweeting a link with
no text to 100 people in a row who don’t follow them at precise 1-minute
intervals, that’s just the price we’ll have to pay."

Actually, Twitter already has similar measures. If you try to send out a link
too many times in a row, your account is disabled. And too many is not 100s of
tweets, but around 10.

This is just anecdotal evidence, but there are clearly some measures in place
to prevent spam. Why Twitter only targets some spam-posting methods and not
others would be interesting to know.

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martingordon
What if it's an engineering problem? What if it were the case that in order
for Twitter to be able to distribute new tweets at the rate and volume that
they do, that they can't run the type of analyses required to effectively curb
spam?

~~~
corin_
They already analyse tweets in real-time, for example to find out what topics
are trending, and what the current "top tweets" are.

~~~
martingordon
That's done after the tweet has been posted though. What I'm wondering is if
they have the ability to check tweets after they're submitted but before
they're posted.

~~~
p4bl0
I don't think it's interesting nor pertinent to do a tweet-per-tweet spam
analysis. What would be something is to automatically block account when a few
operations has been made with it after its creation (like following 1000+
people without having tweeted, following noone but having already 50+ tweets
with @pseudo and a link in it... these kind of obvious indicator of spam
activities).

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rockarage
He's right Twitter spam is a problem. Spam is one of the things that really
hurt myspace, and now it has moved big time to Twitter. I just wonder how many
of the millions of new twitter signups are spammers / spam bots.

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ohashi
I've written some spam filters for twitter and frankly, it's pretty easy to
spot in most cases. The bigger question is why are you following them? If it's
popping up in search that's a different problem I suppose. I have noticed that
they do shutdown a lot of spam accounts when I look back at accounts that I
found were spamming in my spam filter at a later date. I see the results of
them tackling spam, I guess there is a slippery slope problem of - what is or
isn't spam? A lot of stuff is borderline like RSS feeds to twitter accounts?
Bots that message people (twitter seems to have setup their own recommendation
bot) for various reasons?

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Spam can show up in your @mentions feed if you tweet some keyword that a
spambot is searching for.

~~~
corin_
Or often even without any (noticeable) key word that they might respond to,
presumably sometimes they just tweet random accounts.

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p4bl0
A good thing would be to be able to subscribe to spam list of account we trust
(and tell if we trust who they trust or not). I always block and flag as spam
accounts on Twitter and Identi.ca which are spams and follow me. If they keep
track of this I must have flagged something like a hundred of accounts, maybe
more. If we could just split this work between trusted people we could avoid a
lot of following notification caused by spam accounts.

