Huge Amounts Of Twitter Spam Rendering Twitter Totally Useless
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So for the last couple of days there would appear to be larger amounts of Twitter spam appearing and when I logged into my account and my latest 53 @niallharbison messages were all spam replies linking to porn sites. I have heard a few people complaining about this problem but it would appear that the problem is ramping up massively. This has always been one of Twitter’s huge open highways to spam in my opinion as anybody can @reply somebody and if Twitter don’t do something very quickly the bots are going to take over (they have already deemed my account useless) and make twitter pointless for everybody. The sad thing about this is that the only obvious solution would be to remove the ability to @reply somebody you don’t know which would be a major change to the twitter service but something has to be done fast.

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I suspect the solution will be to introduce more automated blocking of accounts based on user submissions.
If X number of people block an account AND report it as spam (via the currently difficult to find route), then the account is automatically blocked.
Obviously, some false positives will result, along with some malicious DOS type attacks against accounts, so Twitter will need to ramp up the appeals process to deal with that as well.
As there are dimwits out there who are stupid enough to respond to the spammer, maybe a proactive “how ******** stupid are you for clicking on that link, didn’t you realise it was a spammer?” messages sent to people who follow these spam-bots might offer the education that is so evidently lacking.
Yeah I agree but it will get massively complicated based on the huge amount of accounts involved and although it annoys me I never actually go and report the spam and not sure how many people actually do?
That ReganMcCallum profile could ‘come in handy’ Niall…
John sorry if it sounded that I was unhappy with these lovely ladies approaching me, that was not the impression I wanted to get across! I am in fact delighted with all the female attention!