Twitter Files Suit Against Spam Software Authors

An anonymous reader writes, quoting Network World: "As with any platform that sees a meteoric rise in popularity, it's only a matter of time before spammers throw their hats in the ring and try and exploit the masses for financial gain and other sinister purposes. As the relatively new kid on the block, Twitter is still busying itself trying to tackle and ultimately prevent spammers from destroying the user experience. While Twitter's previous efforts centered exclusively on engineering-based solutions, the company today announced that they are also pursuing legal avenues to fend off spammers." From the Twitter blog: "With this suit, we’re going straight to the source. By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter."

Multiple Posts

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of this could be solved if they just blocked the same message being tweeted more than two or three times at more than one person. More than one time I have opened up a profile to see that their last 100+ tweets were all the same message just tweeted at 100+ different people.

Re:Go get 'em

[LifesABeach]

Spammers make money marketing products of others. Why is it that those who stand to gain are not also brought to a nuetral third party for judgement?

Re:Multiple Posts

[Karl Cocknozzle]

Mod this up! Identical messages to hundreds (or thousands) of people in a few seconds are SPAM, and almost certainly violate the TOS. Seems like the technical challenge to blocking that sort of spam would be quite low.

Granted, it is hard to tell just what is "spam" on Twitter since, to those of us who aren't regular users of the site, almost all of it looks like unredeemable garbage. But I assume regular tweeters know the difference between what they "want to see" and what they don't.

Re:Multiple Posts

[History's Coming To]

It's the same as the rest of the internet really. Quick explanation for those who don't use it:

You don't see "all the tweets" - that's impossible, both in terms of computers and eyeball 1.0. You pick ("follow") the people you want to hear from, and if anybody puts your name in a tweet you see that too, regardless of whether you follow them. You also see tweets that people you follow have "retweeted".

Therefore, the only real route from the spammer to you is one of the following:

• You follow the spammer. (Why?!)
• Someone you follow retweets the spammer (so you unfollow them if they persist)
• The spammer has included your name in a tweet.

This last one is how it normally works - Twitter have, by design, included a good and easy to use API. It's led to a lot of innovative things, and makes integration very easy. It also makes automating "@PersonX" spam very easy.

It's also very easy to click "report spam", which blocks the account immediately and may well lead to it being deleted. To be honest, the signal/spam ratio on Twitter is fairly low in my experience, and spam can be spotted in the same way as normal - links without much content, an attractive lady in the picture, and a name like "iLovePorn28483".