Stop Social Spam on Twitter

My last article was on stopping and getting rid of Comment and Registration spam on WordPress. Today, I’d like to cover another Social Spam topic: Twitter. You can bet all social networks are a target, and Twitter is no different. Here are a couple tips to minimize and get rid of the Twitter spam such as Direct Message (DM) spam:

Validate your Twitter Apps

1. Login to your Twitter account
2. Click Settings at the top right and then click Connections (or just browse to http://twitter.com/settings/connections)
3. Review all applications that are authorized to access your account
4. Delete ALL applications that you do not use or do not know of by clicking the Revoke Access link below the application description

Verify your Followers

1. Go to TwitBlock at http://www.twitblock.org
2. Click the Scan For Spam button
3. Authorize the application on Twitter
4. Wait for the scan to complete
5. Analyze all suspect Followers
6. Block access to Spammy Followers
7. Do not follow anyone just for the sake of it: be careful of who you follow

Afraid of what this application can do? Just go back to your Account Connections as described in the section above and revoke its access. As far as I can tell, TwitBlock is a perfectly legit application which carries good reviews.

Report Spammers

As this blog article from 2008 indicates, Twitter was forced to hire an anti-spam team in order to counter the ever-increasing amount of spam the social network has experienced. This graph of the Twitter spam trend, dated March 2010, shows that it has a very clear and visible effect on the volumes of spam generated through Twitter.

Take advantage of Twitter’s spam team and report known spammers! For more information, read “How To Report Spam on Twitter” at http://support.twitter.com/entries/64986-how-to-report-spam-on-twitter