Twitter Twerp Scan - block Twitter spammers

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Twitter Twerp Scan - block Twitter spammers

by Jason Clarke Apr 27th 2008

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.

Tags: twitter, twitter-spam, twitter-spammer, twitter-spamming, twitter-twerp, twitter-twerp-scan

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Sensai said 2:12PM on 4-27-2008

File this under another one of those things that everyone does besides me. Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds, (to a lesser extent) Podcasts...I'm just outta the loop.

:-/

Anyone care to explain to me why this is so necessary? I got a great response last time with the RSS feeds, to the point where I'm thinking about trying it out. Anyone wanna try to turn me on to Twitter?

kingkool68 said 2:56PM on 4-27-2008

Twitter in plain english - http://commoncraft.com/Twitter

Also, think of it like a 6th sense by being able to read the minds of the people you follow.

Dan said 2:46PM on 4-27-2008

For the record, you can't view another person's followers, only who they are following.

moby said 6:52PM on 4-27-2008

*trying again, comments here seem to be buggy today*

The site did a good job. It caught every person I suspected. Very simple to use too.

Garry Lacey said 8:23PM on 4-27-2008

My first account on Twitter I worked out who I liked from the popular techosphere then followed everyone they were following. When this got up to about 600 people, it really couldn't manage the stream anymore, it became meaningless. Around 200 or so people were following me back and I never spammed links or even generated much noise, just a few tweets a day.

Now I'm on a new account and I'm following just a handful of people that interest me. Only 3 people are following me now lol

I think kingkool68 is spot on, Twitter is a peephole into the minds of people you might normally only come into contact with through articles or podcasts.

I still think its early days for Twitter, I'm sure it'll develop to cope with people who abuse it and while no service ever really manages to be perfect, with a little effort on our part, I'm sure it'll remain a useful tool.

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