Twitter users are increasingly starting to question whether the frequent number of Twitter accounts that are following them are actually people, or simply a form of Twitter spamming. The rule of thumb with that sort of question is usually that if you think something nefarious might be going on, unfortunately, you're probably right.

The next question that invariably comes up is, well, why? What benefit do these purported Twitter spammers get from friending everyone they possibly can? The answer is twofold:

1. There is a large number of very misguided people that seem to believe that the polite thing to do when someone follows you on Twitter is to follow them back. This is a ludicrous behavior. (As a quick aside, if one of the main things we struggle with in our high-speed, data filled lives is trying to keep a sane signal-to-noise ratio, and learning how to filter out the noise, why would we actively choose to follow random people's Twitter updates? What an incredible waste of time.) The thing is, this behavior can be and is exploited. If someone follows 20,000 random Twitter accounts, there is a very good chance that they will get at least 10% of those people following them back. Perfect! Now they have an audience of 2,000 people to spam, for free.

2. Using that same last example, having your name and possibly a link show up in 20,000 people's lists of followers is simply a form of free advertising. People often go perusing through their list of followers to find out who finds them interesting. Chances are at least some of those people will follow your link to whatever it is you're pimping.

So now that we've discussed whether or not Twitter spamming exists (it does) and whether it's worthwhile (unfortunately, it is), what can we do about it?

Though Twitter itself is conspicuously quiet about the topic of Twitter spamming, and does not offer any useful tools for managing Twitter spam, they do have a useful API available for other developers to make use of. And Carlo Zottman (an employee of Yahoo Germany) did exactly that to create a very useful tool called Twitter Twerp Scan.

Using your credentials, Twitter Twerp Scan will scan your list of followers for accounts that are likely abusing Twitter for public relations purposes. The current default setting is that it will look for accounts that follow more than 1000 people, and has a follower-to-following ratio of 1.5 to 1 or more, though these settings are configurable.

Give it a try and scan your account. You might be surprised at how many people are following you that clearly have no interest in what you have to say, but rather just want to have their name included on your list. Depressing, isn't it?

Welcome to the digital age.