I’m sure this is old news to many, but I’ve recently had my first experience with spammers who “follow” me on Twitter. I joined Twitter yesterday mostly so my dismissal of it could be based on real information instead of blind disdain. Since then, 3 people have started “following”1 me: my friend Jeremy, a dating-site tout account claiming to be named “Rochelle”, and some guy named Jay Benoit who is writing Twitter software. His tweets are variations on “Yep, still writing my software. Workin’ hard.”
The reason this was interesting is it’s the first time I personally have seen spam that uses a pull rather than push model. Email spam pushes email into your box, for instance. This kind of spam does something that is minimally intrusive (except the notifier email becomes a kind of spam, of course) and can be safely ignored. But many people are likely to at least view the spammer’s profile, knowing they can trust the Twitter site to not start trying to feed you viruses and popups. By generating tons of tweets, the spammer might even even garner followers (indeed, both of the above-mentioned spammers have hundreds or thousand of followers.) The tweets themselves offer no computing-world danger since they follow the rules of the Twitter website. So if someone is interested in the spammer’s pitch, even just a little, there’s no danger in following their tweets.
So of course the signal-to-noise ratio for my Twitter account is going to get hammered by this activity, and it will likely be something that pushes me away from Twitter. Unless, of course, those with more net time than I do already know a good solution to this problem?
- Okay, I’ll stop putting this in quotes now. I just find Twitter’s made-up terms to be one of the more disdainable things about it. [↩]