twitter spam

Twitter Reduces Spam to 1% of Tweets – NOT ENOUGH

in Twitter

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Twitter has recently boasted on its blog that they have managed to seriously reduce Twitter spam and that spam now account for just 1% of all tweets.

While the supportive folks on Mashable were quick to join Twitter’s little celebration, pointing out that this figure is impressive since 90% of email is spam, I find it a little misleading. Perhaps 90% of email is spam, but – at least when I use Gmail – none of it reaches my Inbox. However, when I use Twitter, I still deal with spammers daily.

I’m happy that Twitter realizes how important it is to improve the situation when it comes to spam, and I’m truly glad things are improving, but 1% is still too much. I want none of this to reach me in any way, whether in direct messages, direct tweets or aggressive following and unfollowing. All of these behaviors are a huge time suck, and I’m simply too busy to deal with that.

Now, it’s true that as someone who tweets for a living, I probably come across more spam than the average Twitter user, becuase I manage several Twitter accounts for several companies. But as I said, I still have to deal with Twitter spam daily – several times each day in fact for each account that I manage – and this, to me, is unacceptable.

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A Safer Twitter

in Twitter

Great news: Twitter is finally stepping up its efforts to protect users against spam and phishing attacks. The company has announced today on its blog that from now on, all links submitted to Twitter will be routed through a service that detects bad links and prevents their spreading.

For now, the service will focus on Direct Messages and on emails announcing direct messages, since that’s where most of the phishing attacks have been taking place.

Personally, I never ever click a link in a Twitter direct message – even if the message is from a trusted friend, since you never know if the account has been hacked. I tell friends that the best way to reach me and to send me material is through email and not via Twitter DMs. I’ve seen many Twitter accounts who state in their bio that they don’t respond to direct messages – I’m sure many people have simply disabled direct messages notices and want absolutely nothing to do with those.

I wonder if this recent development will change things and make direct messages useful again, or if people have become so weary of them that it’s a lost battle. Regardless, I’m happy to see Twitter taking the phishing issue seriously and protecting their users against it.

Twitter’s Fight Against Spam Goes up a Notch

Twitter recently added a “Report [X user] for Spam” link to users’ profiles. This makes reporting spam accounts easier than before – up until now, you had to report spam messages via a @spam direct message. This is definitely a step in the right direction – Twitter spammers, who mass follow users in an effort [...]

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