Learning to spot Twitter spam

[andrewducker]

Every few weeks I get added by an account which, at closer inspiection, turns out to be a spam bot.

This is a prime example. It's a mixture of quotes which make the "person" sound fun-loving, with a sense of humour, links to a mixture of celebrity gossip and sexiness, and the odd link to helpful things which are basically adverts. And, frankly the celebrity gossip/sexy photos are also on horribly spammy sites which are designed to sell you things too.

I assume that there's a massive library of amusing-ish quotes which are shared between all of these bots. And that most of them are run by the same people. Or possibly franchised out to idiots who think that it will make them money.

In any case, hopefully Twitter will eventually work out a way of spotting them en masse and purge them. But I'm not holding my breath.

Comments

[pseudomonas]

I get about one a day. My heuristics are:

Account has a woman's name
Fewer tweets made than accounts followed
No tweets @ another user.

[pseudomonas]

I suspect the last of these is particularly diagnostic.

[matgb]

Most of the ones I block are the ones that're almost entirely tweets at someone, or a mixture of quotes and @replies. Of course, the @replies are almost entirely links to the same place.

[altamira16]

I have seen a lot of the type andrewducker mentioned. I also have some that are strictly a series of @ to people that they are completely unconnected to. And I also keep reporting and blocking some financial something bot. All of the financial something bots that keep following me have the same icon and are probably for the same company. I have blocked it numerous times. There were two more besides the ones listed here, but they used a different icon so I did not bother to list them.

@FA_BullMarket @FA_FXAlerts @FA_Futures @FA_Autotrading @FA_Forex @FA_Investing @FXB_FractAlerts