Twitter Spam

Spam is annoying and costly. As technology platforms develop, spammers appear to develop their own, increasingly sophisticated tools to do their work more and more efficiently. I think most of us have become familiar with and are used to email spam: It is ubiquitous.

Blogging tools are much more sophisticated than just years ago. The same is unfortunately also true for blog-spam related tools. Spammers generate spam in form of trackbacks and comments, but also as small and large-scale splog networks.

Twitter is still a relatively new platform. Given its young age though, it is already incredibly popular. The spam problem is likewise still in its infancy there. I suspect that it will grow. Here are three example areas worth noting:

1. Follower Spam. At first glance this does not seem like a big problem. Most people do not mind getting more followers and unless they follow the spammer back in return, the user does not really incur a cost as they do not have to look at the spam messages. The spammers do show up on the user’s follower page though and the spammer’s user name and/or their chosen profile image can be as offensive as they choose. There it may become a problem.
2. User names. Spammers have been inventive at developing methods of automatically generating large numbers of websites, signing up for millions of email accounts, etc. A feature of Twitter of course is that the user name is part of the 140 characters that make up a message. In some sense, it is advantageous then to use a short user name, so as to leave more room for the message. Additionally, imagine numerous spammers generating hundreds of millions of new user names of increasing length. On large scale, this may well affect new user’s ability to pick their names as well as their ability to communicate.
3. Reply Spam. As discussed in Spam in the Twitterverse over at The Noisy Channel, there is a lot of potential for this. On the one hand, this is a strength of Twitter: People are easily able to send a message to other people, even if they are not following each other. This is what enables people to build connections and engage in conversation, even if they do not yet know the other person(s). On the other hand though, there is a real potential for this to break down, if abused. Of course it is in everyone’s interest to monitor the Twitter stream for occurrences of their respective user names. Depending on your Twitter activity this can be a reasonable activity to keep track of your Twitter conversations. This would change drastically, if you had to deal with hundreds (or thousands) of spam messages that mention your user name on a daily basis. At the least, you would have a filter problem.

As Twitter, their traffic and user base grow even more, we may well have to deal with an increasing spam problem. I think there will be lots of opportunities for both those who control the platform as well as the broader research and development community to devise interesting approaches to counteract the arising issues.