Twitter Spammers Get Shut Down
Published by Rodney Rumford August 21st, 2008 in twitter.Yesterday I noticed 2 new twitter followers within a few minutes of each other. As I do not auto follow users; I went to see who the new follower was. I actually take the time to learn more about them by looking at their twitter page and look at their blog. Hours later I noticed the twitter account was flagged as SPAM and shut down (frozen)
Screen Shot of the Twitter Spammers Frozen Account
The first tip that this user (I suspect it was the same person) was a spammer was that the user pic was an image of a nearly nude woman (since removed). The users first and only tweet took you to a website that tried to sell you some sort of worthless crap (I honestly can’t remember since it was 3 in the morning).
The second tip that this was a twitter spammer in action was the number of people he was following (~1500) and number following him was less than 12. The imbalance of followers to people he was following was glaringly skewed at over 100:1.
Just now about 26 hours later I noticed the account was flagged as SPAM and shut down (frozen). He was shut down before he actually hit the recently introduced twitter 2000 follow limit. It is not a hard limit; rather the algorithm looks at a few different data sets and behaviors of that users account. This is indicative that the new and continually evolving twitter spam algorithm is working. 
While the account is not totally removed; it is interesting to note that they have removed the post with the link to the website for the garbage they were promoting.
The lesson here for people wanting to use twitter as a traffic driving channel by following people and not having people follow you back & engaging. It does not work, so don’t even bother.
I always visit someone new who follows me, and send them a little thank you note.
I read their stream a bit, and if they are also chatting about Internet Marketing or Tourism marketing or web 2.0, then I’ll add them as well.
You’ve said before, more followers are nice, but only if they are real people who are interested in sharing in similar ideas.
Cheers Rodney.
Good to see the folks at Twitter being proactive against idiot spammers.
Hopefully Twitter remains proactive about this. Nice to hear, Rodney!
I’ve also been hit my the spammers. Got three account all by the same person and decided to throw a post up on it (http://ircfreak.net/2008/08/15/twitter-spam-wait-what/) and then started getting more. Only one of the spam accounts to follow me was flagged and removed, I’d assume because the others weren’t linking to anything). At least twitter is doing something about it. Too bad I’ve had to disable emails from twitter due to the number I was getting.