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How should obvious spam Twitter accounts be reported?
This twitter user added me today, and it's an obvious spam attempt: http://twitter.com/ForSaleByOwner.
I can block him for myself, but is there a preferred way to point these out on an official basis, or do you already investigate based on the block count?
I can block him for myself, but is there a preferred way to point these out on an official basis, or do you already investigate based on the block count?
I’m sad
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We know spam reporting could be easier, and we're trying to make it happen in the fairest, fastest way possible. Stay tuned in for more updates, there will definitely be more improvements soon :)
If you have ideas about how you'd like to report spam, add them here:
http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/to...
and we'll take note. Thanks!
The company and 1 other person say
this answers the question
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Hi guys,
We talked about it today and we think you're right. We should make spam reporting easier while we work on it. You'll now see a "spam report" option on the ticket submission page here:
If you send email to help or support @ twitter.com, you can just type "spam report" in the subject line and we'll see it ASAP.
I’m a fan of progress
The company and 1 other person say
this answers the question
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Hi guys,
We're devising an official spam plan, but as of today, we're still working on it. What's taking time? We're trying to make sure we don't penalize valid accounts. I think we're all looking forward to spam minimization and hopefully, eradication.
What we do presently is investigate profiles based on a number of things. Things that flag an account currently are:
1. following a large number of people in a short amount of time
2. a small number of followers compared to number of people followed
3. updates consisting mainly of links and not personal updates
4. a large number of people blocking the profile
5. individuals writing in with spam complaints
If we receive an email from a person, we always check it out. We will let you guys know when everything is final, so we can get your feedback and work together as a community to keep things the way we want them-- spam free. Thanks for your present efforts in keeping us informed if a profile seems suspicious!
I’m optimistic
The company and 3 other people say
this answers the question
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Inappropriate?Great question. Perhaps there is an e-mail address to forward these kinds of suspicious messages to? Or, some other reporting process? -
Inappropriate?Yes, Twitter investigates and sometimes suspends accounts if many users block it.
You'll find more information on this related thread.
1 person says
this answers the question
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Inappropriate?Firstly, there's no way to just report some twitter account as an obvious spammer account. That's stupid in itself.
THEN, when I want some answers, I get redirected to a separate site that:
(a) doesn't accept my twitter login
(b) requires me to register AGAIN, just to be able to click a link saying "I also have this question".
Why not just ANSWER THE BLOODY QUESTION? The question is:
Where do I find a webpage, or a link to an email address, to which I can report a spam Twitter account?
This is really a stupid and complicated process, quite obviously designed for the sole purpose of link farming.
GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER!
I'm registering here. Why? For the sole purpose of telling everyone about the evil of this website.
I’m pissed off, angry, completely unimpressed
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/signed -
Inappropriate?I'm sorry you're having a tough time. I know it can be frustrating to sign up for additional accounts. We've tried to make that process as lightweight as possible.
I assure you that neither Twitter nor Get Satisfaction is interested in link farming. We're here to talk about customer service, and perhaps we can 1) find out how best to report spam to Twitter, or 2) help Twitter find a good way to deal with spam.
Or, maybe we'll come up with some other great ideas. The possibilities are endless, and many of us are here to focus on building things up and solving problems. We'll try to solve yours.
I’m hoping we can change your mind about what this site is all about.
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Inappropriate?Get Satisfaction is a great way to combine official support, with interactions of other community members who use the product as well and who can add their spin on an issue or come up with alternate suggestions. As a third party service that is used by many companies, it comes with its own account system.
I think Arno would have been less frustrated if we had some kind of official comment from someone at Twitter on this, especially since the spam situation seems to have gotten worse lately, and this is actually billed as the official support channel for them.
Reporting spam is a tricky business. If there were a 'this is spam' checkbox next to the block button (which should be more prominently promoted), who's to say everyone agrees on what is truely spam and what not?
If someone decides to launch an official twitter feed, where all they do is tie it into their RSS feed for their blog, and then mass-add as many people as they can find, I don't think that's the same kind of spam than someone creating a viagra twitter account and adding a bunch of pharmacy site links. But some people would tag both as such.
A scaled down approach would be to explain the block option better, offer more clarity on how they identify spam, and provide one official thread here, where spam twitter users can be reported manually if it's outright, commercial spam on a trial basis, and see how much that gets used.
A response from a Twitter rep would be great, although Crystal did already explain their policy as of 4 months ago here.
2 people say
this answers the question
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Inappropriate?Joost, I 100% agree that the definition of spam on Twitter is very subjective. However, I think that the scenario of a Viagra twitter account mass-adding people on Twitter is clearly spam and there needs to be clear ways to deal with this. I also think that the current "party line" on this (blocking the user) is not ideal. It's not clear to most Twitter users that blocking is the preferred way to report spam and 99% of Twitter users will not take the time to sift through the various threads on Get Satisfaction to find out that blocking is the way to deal with this.
And on top of that, there are all kinds of other gestures that blocking is used for - e.g. someone might block someone because they have a personal dispute with them, they might disagree with their politics, etc. How can Twitter accurately identify spammers with the block function when there are so many different intentions behind a block?
Crytal, Ev, Biz - please join us in the conversation here. We know that stability and scaling is the #1 priority now but this one is #2 and pretty soon will be #1. Let's fix this before it becomes a bigger problem.
I’m concerned
1 person says
this answers the question
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Inappropriate?Yes, you are right. The spam situation w/r/t Twitter does seem to be getting worse quickly, although I am confident it can be licked. And, yes, having official reps chime in is always the best case scenario -- it's what we're shooting for. We'll see if we can't get that to happen soon. Thanks for your patience!
I’m thinking we've started a great conversation
1 person says
this answers the question
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Inappropriate?Thanks to everyone for the replies.
Look, I understand that you have a login process. I also feel that honouring my Twitter login would have been a VERY nice touch, especially to an already frustrated person.
There are a couple options wrt the spam issue. One is to make the proposed "report as spam" button actually just flag the appropriate account for human moderation.
The other option would be useful not only for spam but to handle other abuses: the "block" option might pop up a little JS window / take you to a page (urgh) that will give you a few tickboxes, wherein you can tell Twitter exactly WHY you're blocking said person.
So maybe you block someone and tell Twitter it's for spamming, and the account gets flagged for spam. Block someone just for irritating you, and it just blocks him. Block an account for, say, distasteful content, and it gets flagged a different way for human moderation.
I think that expanding the functionality of the "block" option is the sanest option, as it doesn't only serve one option as a "flag as spam" link would.
Any opinions?1 Comment Add a comment
This answers the question
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Hi Arno, Thanks for your input. Get Satisfaction is still in beta and we're constantly working on releasing new features & functionality. (As you can see, this topic page has just changed to bring what we hope will be some more useful features to the community.) We actually do now support the feature of passing through of accounts and are looking forward to working with Twitter to implement it.
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Inappropriate?Hi guys,
We're devising an official spam plan, but as of today, we're still working on it. What's taking time? We're trying to make sure we don't penalize valid accounts. I think we're all looking forward to spam minimization and hopefully, eradication.
What we do presently is investigate profiles based on a number of things. Things that flag an account currently are:
1. following a large number of people in a short amount of time
2. a small number of followers compared to number of people followed
3. updates consisting mainly of links and not personal updates
4. a large number of people blocking the profile
5. individuals writing in with spam complaints
If we receive an email from a person, we always check it out. We will let you guys know when everything is final, so we can get your feedback and work together as a community to keep things the way we want them-- spam free. Thanks for your present efforts in keeping us informed if a profile seems suspicious!
I’m optimistic
The company and 3 other people say
this answers the question
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This answers the question
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Crystal, it's great to hear that the official spam plan is coming together and I think the criteria that you guys are looking at is in line with what the Twitter community is looking for.
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How do we maybe hint at someone who's abusing the system? There's a user currently who's using @username code CONSTANTLY (and only) and linking to the same link over and over, about personal injury lawyers (user is mytweets)
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How is that "Official Spam Plan" Comming together. 3 Months seems like an adequate time frame? No? How much longer do you need?
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Hi James. 8-) Some of the things that Twitter has done to combat spam are mentioned here: http://gsfn.us/t/jcq#reply_528321. Also, I've logged well over two dozen spam reports in the last month, and Twitter responded to those and took action. I can totally relate to the spam frustration, though... as Twitter becomes more popular, it seems more spammers come and try to game the system.
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Thanks mdy for the information. I am trying to do my part also by reporting obvious spammers. My frustration isn't that I don't think that Twitter is serious about spammers. It is that you have not improved the reporting system. What you have currently feels like something from 2005. A simple link on the profile page "Report as Spammer" is the obvious solution.
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Inappropriate?Hi Crystal. Thanks for clarifying and keeping us up to date.
You talked about individuals writing in under #5. Are you referring to the 'Twitter, Help!' form at http://twitter.com/help? Would this be a 'request' style contact?
Other than the PR & partners email addresses, I don't see any other direct contact method published.
I’m happy
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This answers the question
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This would be a good place to submit a report. Also, you can send an email to help or support @ twitter.com; just make the subject "spam report" and we'll see it right away :)
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I removed it from the public timeline, and we're still investigating it.
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Inappropriate?Mike (mdoeff here) may have been too modest to pimp his own blog here, but he's been finding some good twitter spam links and posting them to his link blog.
There's even a whole blog called Stop Twitter Spam.
3 Comments Add a comment
This answers the question
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Blogs about Twitter spam? The mind boggles.
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Not just one, but TWO of them! http://www.twitterspam.com/
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And there's a third one: http://twitspam.blogspot.com
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Inappropriate?Hi guys,
We talked about it today and we think you're right. We should make spam reporting easier while we work on it. You'll now see a "spam report" option on the ticket submission page here:
If you send email to help or support @ twitter.com, you can just type "spam report" in the subject line and we'll see it ASAP.
I’m a fan of progress
The company and 1 other person say
this answers the question
5 Comments Add a comment
This answers the question
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It's great to see progress on this issue. Thank you for listening to the community!
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Ditto. I hope I won't have to use it too much, but it's good to hear the latest official word.
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This is progress, for sure, but still too cumbersome. Twitter has been a completely painless and satisfying service until the past few days. Even with the new "spam report" option, I still have to go from the add notification email to the twitter site, find the ticket submission page, do some copy/pasting to identify the spammer, etc.
What would really make this workable is a link, either right in the notification email, or visible on the new follower's profile page when clicking to it from the notification email -- click the link, block the new follower (even better if it specifically is a "I think this is follow spam" indication).
This wouldn't be abusable as a griefing mechanism, because it would only be made available when the spammer has taken the affirmative action of following you. -
Neglected to include in my novella: even blocking a new follower is a whole lot of clicks. Please help me help you by giving me a one- or two-click path to blocking new followers or reporting follow-spammers.
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Hurt: if you get an new follower notification and you want to report it as spam, just copy the username and compose an email to help or support @ twitter.com, with subject title "spam report" and the user name in the body. it's faster than clicking around while we're figuring things out.
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Inappropriate?This kind of response is the sort of thing that gives one a warm fuzzy feeling about Web 2.0 in general. It is totally awesome that Twitter has come to the table on this, and listened to the community in this way.
Needless to say, I'm not looking elsewhere for my microblogging needs anymore :-)
"My" spammer wasn't the above account, but http://twitter.com/juancarzola. This account is quite cleverly done, it quotes random proverbs and sayings from $proverb_website and intersperses them with spam links. Also, quite suspiciously, following the account's external website links all seem to lead to pages which have been suspended.
Spammers are getting smarter... The spammer you should watch out for is not the v14gr4 spammer but the social engineer.
I’m overwhelmed, happy
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>copy the username and compose an email to help or support @ twitter.com, with subject title "spam report" and the user name in the body
Now thats what is NOT called web 2.0 :-( It is called "How we did it 10 years ago". -
Inappropriate?We know spam reporting could be easier, and we're trying to make it happen in the fairest, fastest way possible. Stay tuned in for more updates, there will definitely be more improvements soon :)
If you have ideas about how you'd like to report spam, add them here:
http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/to...
and we'll take note. Thanks!
The company and 1 other person say
this answers the question
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Inappropriate?We can now also report spammers by sending a Direct Message to Twitter's @spam account.
To do this, you'll first need to follow http://twitter.com/spam. You can then send a direct message to @spam either by:
1. Typing a direct message from the "What are you doing?" box
Ex. d spam @spammy1, @spammy2 are spambots!
2. Sending a direct message from your phone
Ex. d spam @spammy3 is yet another spambot
3. Composing a direct message at http://twitter.com/direct_messages
1 person says
this answers the question
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This answers the question
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Thanks much for the update, mdy!
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Inappropriate?I used to have a public profile, but after a spammer started following me, it opened up the door for hundreds (!) of other spammers. After repeatedly blocking and blocking and blocking and sending tweets to @spam (I sent a whole bunch yesterday), I finally got fed up with it.
Now, my profile is private, but I'm still getting follower requests from spammers about 1 every 3 minutes. I wake up in the morning and find a few hundred requests have queued up... all spammers. Should I spam the @spam account with reporting them all? I block them in the "friends request" page, but they keep coming. As I write this, I've received 5 more requests.
Twitter is great and I love the concept, but this is making too much work for me. At what point do you just say "delete my account" and leave forever?
I’m frustrated
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Inappropriate?This has happened some times in the last years. Some ppl have an idea and bring up a basic website with no further security against spammers. Then out of a sudden the website becomes popular and gets spammed to death. And the ppl only discuss "what could be the best spam plan" for months instead of using known tactics/code that work for other sites for years. I will never understand this. Is it lack of money to pay good programmers?
I’m sad
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