Like ants at a picnic, it doesn’t take long for those persistent spammers and online marketers to appear with every new online experience. Just as it happened with pop-up and pop-under ads, with email, with Facebook, and with blogs, spammers are now appearing on Twitter. This trend is beginning to diminish the quality of the Twitter experience, and frustrate some of its most loyal users. For instance, spammers having been gaming the system by posting the popular hashtags, “Kanye West” for example, to attract traffic. Another exploit is to lure users into turning on the auto-following application, where users follow the people who follow them. This can be a mistake, allowing spammers to push incoming messages. A more legitimate example comes from Moonfruit, a British web site development company. Moonfruit ran a competition and challenged tweeters to include “#moonfruit” in their hashtags, in return for a chance to win a MacBook. Perhaps Moonfruit thought this promotional scheme was playing by the rules but Twitter didn’t see it that way, and put a stop to it. The Federal Trade Commission monitors the activity on Twitter. But in the context of constantly-changing technology, and the agency’s current project to combat deceptive product endorsements on blogs, policing Twitter isn’t one of the FTC’s top priorities. This leaves Twitter to protect its own interests, and keep the service attractive to its users. The company has recently updated its terms-of-use agreement to fight the abuse of hashtaqs, and has identified and deleted many “churn-and-burn” spamming accounts.
Ann Hayman @ 7:22 am
Please continue to delete the spam, if I want Spam I will go to the grocery store and pick up a can.
Thanks
Jae @ 7:51 am
All the Twitter Spam has been so frustrating. I no longer open any direct mail unless I have asked for a DM. I opened one that said, “Your company is on the video.” Sure I opened it and what it did is attache my followers and send them all the same email from me. This is not a game to me and I do not have time to play games. So I still post but rarely do I open any messages… delete, delete. If this continues it will hurt Twitter. Twitter needs to build stronger and stronger walls to keep the spammers out. Yes the will continue to penetrate but build again and again. Twitter spend your new found money on whatever it take to keep them out.