Reporting Spam on Twitter is Now Easy! But Don't Shoot the Messenger!!!

As social networking sites grow and try to better monetize their services, “new features” aren’t necessarily free (LinkedIn’s new Profile Organizer) and “new enhancements” aren’t necessarily better than their previous functionality.  In fact, sometimes these new features aren’t even accessible to everyone!  (LinkedIn Features: Does Everyone Have Equal Access?)  That’s why it is such a breath of fresh air to see Twitter adding a new feature which was truly needed: one-click, anonymous reporting of spam!  And it works like a charm!

The timing of this is especially important as the spammers on Twitter were growing exponentially and resorting to not only the old Direct Message spam but the new @Reply spam.  Since Twitter didn’t have a solution for stopping the spam that I knew about, I wrote a blog post just over a month ago with a creative solution that took advantage of the viral aspects of Twitter: How Can We Help Reduce Twitter Spam? Broadcast the Spammer! That post is still one of my most read and retweeted posts, so there are a lot of people who were getting sick of the growing spam problem.

It was after I wrote that post that I ended up having a lengthy conversation with one of my Twitter followers who said that everyone should report spam the “official” way: Follow @Spam on Twitter and send a DM with the profile name of the spammer.  In addition, you could go to the spammer’s profile and block them.  This also meant that there was no longer any risk to you because once you broadcast the spammer’s name, they can seek revenge on you by blocking you in return.

If you hadn’t noticed Twitter recently came up with their own new solution to the problem which I think is ideal: If you go to anyone’s profile now, you will see, in addition to the option of blocking that profile, the option of reporting a profile for spam.  Should you select that, not only will you be reporting that person to Twitter for spam, that person will also be blocked from your timeline!  No need to broadcast!  And no need to copy and paste profile names to a Direct Message!

It is now easy and fun to report spammers on Twitter!  End of story, but a big “THANK YOU!” to the people at Twitter who listened to our problems and made this happen!

But since we’re on the subject, this won’t stop new spammers from joining Twitter…can’t Twitter start looking at IP addresses and limiting people based on that information instead of simple email addresses?  It is just too easy to join and spam!  Any of you more tech-savvy readers of this blog have any proposed solutions?

P.S. The related articles below all take a different approach on this new feature by talking about Twitter asking its users to report spam, but all of the social networking sites have been doing this so this is not new.  What is new is the additional user interface to make this is easier for us to do.  But without preventing spammers from joining in the first place, we are in for a long fight ahead…

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• Twitter turns to its users for fighting spam (vator.tv)
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• Twitter enlists users to help fight spam (news.cnet.com)

Image via Wikipedia

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!

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• Spam In Twitter Trends, Again (Update: Not Really Spam) (mashable.com)

Image by Neal Schaffer

I was at a networking event last night where someone asked me if I was seeing more “spam” on LinkedIn.  If you have been utilizing LinkedIn or Twitter for the last several weeks, you probably have noticed an uptick in the spam in any of the following ways:

• Twitter @Reply Spam
• Twitter Direct Message Spam
• LinkedIn Group Message Spam
• LinkedIn Group Discussion Board Spam
• LinkedIn Connections “opting-you-in” to Mailing List Spam

You will notice that, although LinkedIn considers the text of an invitation that you receive as a potential spam target and has decided to restrict everyone’s ability to put a URL in their invitation text, I do not think this is the issue.  If you get spam for a LinkedIn invitation, you have the option to “Report as spam.”  No, the problem is that people are joining LinkedIn (and Twitter) with the intent to spam you, and these people need to be rooted out of the system once and for all.

Twitter is taking matters into their own hand and has already went through times where they rooted out literally thousands of these spammers recently by disabling their accounts.  Furthermore, in Twitter’s new Terms of Service Agreement, they point out that they will continue to disable the account of spammers looking at a number of different things, including how many people block the account, amount of automated tweeting, etc.

Now, if Twitter can do this, why can’t LinkedIn?

Yesterday I had another episode of receiving a stack of invites from a number of fake LinkedIn profiles.  I have reported this to you all before and why fake profiles on LinkedIn exist.  These people exploit the open networking movement and send invites to LIONs like myself.  Which is why I and other open networkers are the perfect people to help LinkedIn police their membership.

But why can’t LinkedIn police their own membership?

The people that sent me invites, as you can see from the screen above (I have pixel-blasted out names but you should get the picture) are all people who work in the same industry, have the same company name (NAME and Associates), and have a remarkably similar number of connections, between 396 and 402.  Doesn’t that strike you as odd?  How do I report these people to LinkedIn?

Better yet:

If I Can Spot a Fake LinkedIn Profile, Why Can’t LinkedIn?

And isn’t it in LinkedIn’s best interest to root these people out of the system on behalf of its user community?

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• Bits: Spammers Shorten Their URLs (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
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