How We Can Help Reduce Twitter Spam: Broadcast the Spammer!

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I got sick of Twitter spam, and I decided to do something creative about it. And I think it’s working. You can help join the fight too.

I don’t know if you have noticed recently, but Twitter spam has now gone beyond the mere obnoxious automated Direct Message. There has been a sudden uptick in spammers mentioning your name, along with a few others, together with a few words and a link. “Build a list bigger than Oprah’s!,” “New Affiliate Program,” etc. are usually the text with an affiliate link to try to sell you something. You will notice these when you look at your @Replies, which up until now was truly reserved for tweets that were only personal to you.

The Internet Marketing crowd is truly trying to hijack social media.

If you think about it, most people will look at their Direct Messages as well as their @Replies to filter out messages coming to them, so it was only a matter of time before spammers took their activities to the next level. It’s like the LinkedIn spammers who join Groups only to send you a message, because in this way they do not need to be connected to you to spam you. Same with Twitter: anyone can send anyone a tweet with your @Username in it, regardless if you follow each other.

Similar to LinkedIn, I believe that I am targeted a lot on Twitter because I have a large following. And like LinkedIn, this gives me the ability to find out and potentially report who the spammers are. I was really getting tired of seeing these spammers continuing to invade my @Reply timeline. What was I to do?

If you think about it, spammers target social media, especially Twitter, because of its viral nature. Why not use this same viral nature of Twitter to fight back at spam by broadcasting it? If someone sends me an @Reply spam, I will merely broadcast that person’s username together with the message that they are sending spam to my 30,000+ followers. I add on the hashtag #STOPSPAM (started with #SPAM but now taking it one step further!) at the end of the message so that tweeple can monitor the tweets. I then block that person. And hopefully others will do the same.

It is amazing how good it felt after I stopped doing this. First of all, after you block someone, their tweets immediately disappear from your timeline. Plus you know that they can’t access you again in the future. No, the best thing about all of this were all of the people who sent me messages of encouragement and agreement, that now is the time to do something about the increasing amount of this type of spam on Twitter.

I was with a friend over the weekend telling him about this, and proceeded to check the username of three of the people that I had broadcasted about. Guess what? They were gone! Removed from Twitter! How did this happen?

If you look at the official Twitter rules, it clearly states that the following types of activities are considered spam:

If a large number of people are blocking you;
The number of spam complaints that have been filed against you;

So the more we block the spammers, we CAN and WILL win the battle…at least until the next spammer comes around ;-(

You will notice the mention of the “number of spam complaints” as another criteria of suspending a Twitter account. Upon further research, Twitter does have its own official way of dealing with spam in the Twitter Filing Terms of Service of Rules Complaints page:

To report spam, follow the Twitter user @spam, and send us a direct message with the user name of the spammer.

The problem I have with that is just sending a Direct Message does not take that spammer off of your timeline. Plus, why not use the viral nature of Twitter to broadcast and get more people to block, clearing everyone’s timelines of these @Reply spam messages?

There are many other creative solutions to the problem, so please comment and tell me how YOU battle Twitter spam!

Classic (And Evil) Twitter Spam (markevanstech.com)
TwitChuck – The Good, The Bad and The Spammy (twi5.com)
#BlockMonday: Taking Back Twitter (atomicpoet.wordpress.com)
Spam In Twitter Trends, Again (Update: Not Really Spam) (mashable.com)

Marie Nordhues

Thanks Neil! I've been doing that with my spammers also but now when I have a chance I will also look up #stopspam and block all those users as well (after of course checking them out to make sure they are spam -- I can see how that could get abused).

nealschaffer

Hi Marie,
Actually since I wrote that post I wrote a newer one about how you can now go to a user's profile and block and report them at the same time. I believe that that is now the preferred way of reporting spammers to Twitter and blocking them from bothering you.
- Neal

ALINX

Can you define SPAM, what is the basic difference from Marketing? Take away SPAM/Marketing and what are you left with. I have a business and use the internet and really don't want to SPAM just Market.

We need clear guidelines. The only other observation is that the tweets all look like SPAM to me, and have no value, unless they have link to a blog thats doing knowledge transferr.

nealschaffer

Hi Alex,

I consider spam being mail that was never requested by the user. If the user finds value in this "spam," it is no longer spam. But the risk is if the user believes that there is no value or relevance in what they receive, they will call the sender a spammer.

From a consumer perspective, just because we have an email address or a Twitter username, it doesn't give everyone a right to send us unsolicited mail. If we sign up to your mailing list it is one thing. But if there is an @Reply message from someone who we don't know trying to "sell" us something, I would define that as spam.

At the end of the day, a lot of spam IS marketing, but I don't consider all spam to be mere marketing. And anyone is free to blog or tweet all day long about their products should they wish. They cross the line when they opt people in to mailing lists, send @Replies, and transmit emails to people who never requested the information.

At the end of the day, the Social Web is about people developing relationships and finding information. If Internet marketers want to play in this arena, they need to Pay It Forward by sharing information and marketing themselves in a much more savvy way. I wrote about this in my blog post this week on "What is Windmill Networking" and Blendtec is a great example. They didn't follow 100,000 people on Twitter and spam them with blender ads. They created educational and entertaining videos which they shared and won fans. That is what social media marketing is all about!

Would love to carry the conversation with you offline if you are interested. Please feel free to contact me.

Best,
Neal

Matt Dunlap

Twitter spam support is a joke...

Problem with you solution is that a spammer can make hundreds, maybe thousands of accounts a day... Twitter doesn't require you to provide a real email so as soon as you get blocked you can start a new account. Or, better yet, just log into the suspended account, change the username and then go make a new account with the old username...

nealschaffer

Indeed, you are correct Matt. Hopefully, though, spammers will start a blacklist and will want to avoid me and others who broadcast them, especially if we do it to lots of followers.

ShellyKramer

Amen brother! That is exactly what I do and exactly what I believe. Thus, I've developed this rep that I love to beat up spammers -- not the case at all. I just want to get them outta here. And I believe that ignoring them is not the way to go. I am a firm believer in public humiliation as well as an announcement to others to block and, thereby, denounce these losers.

w00ty w00t w00t to you, my friend!

nealschaffer

Hallelujah sister! That's what I blog for...to make a connection with similar-minded people. If they can use Twitter against us, why can't we use it against them?

WOOT!

dr. ellen brandt

Neal,

I wish you'd read my story on spam, out a few days ago, the first story in my Media Revolution series:

http://tiny.cc/m5jwe

Here's the Intro to the series:

http://tiny.cc/nshkK

Your readers should be made aware that legally, spam must have a commercial element, meaning someone wants you to part with your money for one reason or another.

Freely-distributed publications, even political ones, with which you do not agree philosophically are not spam.

Unfortunately, a large proportion of spam complaints to Twitter and elsewhere, target not actual spam, like the continuous advertisements to "Get 10,000 Twitter Followers," "Buy Foreclosed Homes", "Hot Stock Tip," or the direct marketing activities of the Trump Network and others.

Instead, many complaints target publications the reader doesn't like, usually for political reasons.

Once again: Publications offered for free are not spam. Read the CANSpam accords, if you doubt this truth.

And overwhelmingly, I might add, because of the current political environment, virtually all these publication-oriented faux spam complaints, generally from the very young, target Centrist or Right-of-Center publications.

In a different political environment, other sorts of publications could fall victim to these false allegations.

So everyone who publishes on the Internet should be concerned about this trend as a true Freedom of Speech issue.

Ellen

nealschaffer

Thank you for your thoughtful comments and contribution to the discussion. Freedom of speech must absolutely be upheld. The problem is that these people are targetting their broadcasts at specific users by using their usernames. If they don't use any usernames they are free to broadcast as is.

As for the misuse of spam, I agree with you 100%. You should have the right to broadcast any opinion you want. But the minute you put a username in your message, you are now risking that this person will report you as spam because they did not opt-in to be sold to.

chris

what prevents someone from taking a spammy looking piece of content, throwing your name on it, and then broadcasting it to a large group, so that a bunch of followers, who believe they're blocking a spammer, actually end up blocking you and getting your account temporarily restricted?

nealschaffer

Well, you are absolutely right. In fact, I talked to a friend yesterday who mentioned that this happened to her company. They took her RSS feed, and then reprogrammed the shortened links to lead them to another site.

At the end of the day, if the spammers want to attack us they will. But I do believe that Twitter will put everything into consideration when considering to close accounts, even temporarily. And you gotta believe that there are way more Twitter users than spammers, so their trying to block us may be futile.

QuantumGood

Most essential IS to report them as spam. Blocking reported spammers works to get them removed from Twitter. Blocking unreported spammers just removes them from your timeline and leaves them to go after other people.

nealschaffer

A combination of both (block + report) is the most thorough approach for sure. But just my broadcasting (combined with a lot of other people reporting, perhaps) helped in some way get those three people in my blog post removed from Twitter...if that didn't happen I wouldn't have written this post.

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