Spammers following thousands of people

The reason I have this problem is that I am forced to have my timeline public to use the twitter facebook app. I would prefer not to as it opens me up to these spammer stalkers.

I appreciate that posting my twitters to my facebook status opens them up a bit, but surely we should just be warned of this, rather than forced to open up to all comers?

Ringernation jumped right on with me... no idea who this is or why... a spammer?

Am also unable to shake off spammer ringernation... blocking them does not remove them from my followers. Also, I didn't get an email to let me know they had started following me, like I do with all others. Have they hacked the system somehow?

this spammer was following over 4,000 in 2 hours: http://twitter.com/nikkikwiki

Tangyerik and amy1974 are also blocked, but not removed, spammers who're following me.

Out of curiosity, though ... why do you care if an account, any account, can follow your twitters? Note they can't force you to read anything, just act as a big data-tap. The means by which you can make your twits private is in the system, that Facebook's ap isn't compatible with that seems more a failure of the ap rather than Twitter (which has plenty of failings, but that's not one of them).

Remember, it's not spam if they can't send you anything. They may be serial adders and wasters of Twitter back-end resources but from your perspective, they have marginal if any impact on you at all.

I've been struggling with spammers. The Twitter option to "protect my updates" is too harsh. I'd like to be on the public timeline and have my page available for public viewing, but I'd also like to approve followers.

This seems to me like a obvious thing to do. Those spammers following thousands of people must consume lots of system resources and clutter up a struggling system.

I'm also surprised that Twitter don't automatically identify spammers. Surely someone following 32,000 people is some sort of 'bot? No real person could cope with receiving that many updates. Something as simple as requiring Twitter's approval for more than 500 follows or something would do. Wouldn't it?

I'm sure there's some simple solutions to this problem that would help the system too.

I'd like to invite some people to Twitter, but until this problem goes away, I don't feel I can!

I too am sick of these people abusing twitter. Twitter is having a hard enough time keeping up for normal users. I'm sure these spammers are taxing twitters backbone. I've been listing them on http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Fakers

I get added by "spammers," but I ignore them. I reckon this is twitter's concern, mainly, in that they're using up twitter's resources, but then again, I have had some problems with reaching and using twitter at times, so maybe they should be looking into this more actively.

@ Alexander Williams -- A couple reasons:

1) Because these people follow thousands (and I mean tens of thousands) of Twitterers with the sole intention of promoting a website of theirs, and probably not taking much interest in the posts of people they're following. Even if they were interested, it would be hard to keep track of thousands of people at a given time. I simply don't like the idea of people following me solely to promote their site. I had at least two spammers follow me; their profile showed a website, and their first tweet said (more or less) "Must figure out a way to get more people to check out my site." If I see that in someone's site, sorry, but I have no interest in you, and I'm not eager to have you follow my every tweet, even if I'm one of 100,000+ people you're following.

2) Like you said, the spammers waste Twitter's back-end resources. Considering the notoriety that Twitter has regarding reliability and crashing due to stress, I think they'd want to take whatever measures they can to help keep their servers running smoothly, including the deletion of accounts that collect tons of tweets for no reason other than site promotion. I'd say that has quite a bit of impact on the users, along with Twitter. (That's not to say that spammers are the sole cause of Twitter's crashes)

While I agree that it's not the normal definition of spamming, I still consider it a form of spamming. Collecting account names for the sole purpose of promoting or selling something is spamming in my mind.

@ Alexander Williams
It's not facebook's app, it's twitter's app running on the facebook platform.

And I choose to receive updates when somebody starts following me, so I do receive the publicity from these spammers. Of course I can turn these off, but this means that this functionality has been totally destroyed by these spammers, or whatever you prefer to call them - denial of service nuisance makers.

I don't see why I shouldn't choose to have my twitters just go to friends and facebook friends.

I have had a number of accounts that have tried to follow me - I've started to block them and will go back and clean up my account now - but they all seem to be pointing to http://www.the6figureteam.com/ and have soft-core porn as profile pics!