Privacy, Security & Virus Information

Twitter Spam: Keep Your Account Clean and Your Reputation Intact

When a good website begins to develop, so do the threats against it. Twitter was still in its early days when the first member of their ‘Trust & Safety’ virus-busting crusade was hired. Now, there are 30 staffers who all battle the intense threat of monitoring the activity of millions of tweeters.

This team monitors affiliate links (URLs that people publicise for money, but direct you to dangerous sites where contact information and even credit card details can be requested) and unusual behaviour from some Twitter accounts. The main approach that this growing company takes for preventing spam is to suspend accounts acting suspiciously, instead of filtering content that appears to be spam-like in nature.

So: with this in mind, how can you prevent spam that can compromise your reputation in a world where corporate companies rely on Twitter to communicate?

• Be careful what you tweet. The world is obsessed with the ‘iPad’, and recent threats on Twitter have included bots designed to automatically reply with a message from a user who purportedly won a free iPad, followed by a link to a malicious website. In these cases, just delete the tweet – it could lead to a dangerous page offering free devices in exchange for a short survey, or a phished e-commerce service that looks legitimate.
  
  
• Make sure you report Twitter users responsible for spam to the company. This results in accounts being automatically suspended unless the member files for reinstatement. After that, requests are processed on a case-by-case basis. Filtering content is impossible because of the sheer quantity of tweets posted every week (well over one billion, according to April 2011 estimates), and because of how important messages can be retweeted, and such duplication may not necessarily be spam.

Although Twitter’s working hard to prevent spam, there will always be threats, and this is why vigilance is always essential.

 

Article by Connor Sephton, 14th September 2011.