Stop the Twitter bots stop the spam
I do like Twitter, I use it on a daily basis to keep in contact with friends, work mates and contacts I have on the web but a major problem that just seems to be getting worse is Twitter spam.
There are many forms of Twitter spam, for example people following thousands of people just to get themselves noticed. Twitter is clamping down on this as much as it can but more recently more forms of spam are becoming rife. One form of spam that I really find annoying is the automatic replies you get from Twitter bots that pick up what you have tweeted recently and send you a response based on keywords.
Have you had any of these tweets recently? I can name a few that I have had and they really do frustrate me as there is nothing you can do to prevent them, they are in my opinion worse than email spam. They aren’t even from a real person so even If you complain or respond to the tweet you won’t necessarily get a response from them. Worse than that you will probably get another spam tweet for contacting them.
What do they provide to the person receiving them, is there any benefit? In some cases they could be useful although I can’t think of any right now. In my experience more often than not they are a waste of time and just clutter my twitter account. Have you had any experience of Twitter bots?
My bad experience
I had a very annoying encounter with one particular Twitter bot recently. After a long day of work I was unfortunately given the news that my girl friend’s handbag had been stolen. I am not sure why but as I was sat at my computer when I was told the news I decided to vent my anger on twitter, nothing fancy just stated I was angry as the bag had been stolen. Within minutes maybe even seconds I had a tweet come through from someone telling me about a new handbag I could buy and provided me with a link. I was very shocked at this, in normal circumstances I am sure this might be OK even though it would still be annoying but as I was dealing with a bad issue getting this tweet really didn’t make me happy. In fact my first reaction was to question if this was some kind of joke.
The bot had obviously just found the keyword handbag and automatically replied to me. If this were a company that I would come across again in the future, do you think after this experience I would buy from them? I know you know the answer but just in case the answer is NO.
Taking into account the fact that my situation is unique and that most people tweeting about a bag would normally be simply remarking on them somehow would this tweet of been useful? In my opinion I don’ think it would have been. It is purely spam unwanted communication from someone you did not want to be in contact with.
I believe bots should be banned from Twitter unless they have a fundamental reason to be used and are actually useful.
Written by Lee Doel from The Funk HousePosted on July 18th, 2009 and filed under Social Media
Do not forget to subscribe to our RSS feed for updates
16 Responses to “Stop the Twitter bots stop the spam”
Author comments are in a darker gray color for you to easily identify the posts author in the comments
Trackbacks
Comments are closed.
Comments are closed since this post is older than 30 days. However, you can continue this discussion in our popular Blogging Forums
Sponsors
Blogging Tips Newsletter
Sign up to the Blogging Tips Newsletter for Free today and get a free ebook!
Too bad about your experience. I have had some spam tweets…guess it doesn’t bother me that much. There were even one or two that I did have some interest in. I am probably biased because I’m in sales. There could be a great product out there that you might love, but you might never get to enjoy it if you never heard about it.
I agree some could be useful so maybe there should be a way to have an option to have such messages or to have the option to block them. right now we don’t have a choice and that is the frustrating bit.
IMO we cannot stop the spammers even Google the giant company is still still trying to on its search engine.
Yes sadly i think you are right but i believe we should have the tools to help us stop it. Someone is always going to exploit the system but we need to think about this more when we create such things as twitter.
Well put – you might not be able to stop ALL spammers from trying, but we would be stupid not to try. My email account gets filled up with spam all the time, but luckily I have an incredible spam filter that prevents me from seeing most of it. Twitter should be coming out with something like this soon.
The two types of auto bots I hate on twitter are those that retweet you when you’ve made a specific comment, annoyingly they tend to retweet several times as I don’t think they work too well, and then those that automatically follow you on certain keywords.
I can understand how annoying it is to receive spam comments based on your rant. It may have just been the timing but it doesn’t forgive the spam. It’s stuff like that which then makes you wonder if it’s worth protecting your tweets and prevent your account receiving replies from people you don’t follow. Just a shame that you lose the community feel/spirit from doing so.
Ye it was probably just bad timing but i was not happy with it. I wouldn’t want to block my tweets as i like the fact you get random people commenting on your tweets now and then and you get more followers in doing so. As i have mentioned in comments above i wish there were some way of restricting the bots. As they must be using the api there must be some way to monitor them?
If I receive completely pointless spam like that I go and block the user. I figure it stops that particular account spamming me again and I also hope that if enough people do the same, it will come to twitter’s attention.
I am adding comment just because i also felt some serious type of spams present in twitter lately.
First there are various people or may be bots that follow many people randomly just thinking that we could follow them in return or simply what you say to get noticed. Having a lot followers in twitter is not a bad thing but if they are not genuine and serious followers, its not even a great thing.
And the most hating thing about that is, they spam more by sending short links which are meant to get to their spam site.
Its time for Twitter to take some serious and effective steps to control the growing spam.
I keeping getting spammed with “I just become a member of this AWESOME site that gets you TONS of followers” and then it links an address. Driving me nuts. I signed up for one of what I thought was an auto-follow service (when someone follows me I auto follow them) but it turned out to be a train. Now I’m having to go through 150+ followers one at a time and unfollow whoever seems to have come from that train.
Honestly I’ve never been a huge fan of twitter and now I’m seeing more clearly why I’m not a fan of it. The spam is just outrageous.
The spam that kills me are all the people that setup an account and never interact with anyone. Every single tweet is a sales pitch and they seem to tweet every couple of seconds. It may not be considered spam but it can quickly fill your entire page with just that single user’s tweets. I unfollow them of course. I’ve also learned not to follow those using automated systems like TwitterFeed unless there is actual conversation on the first page of their profile. Very annoying.
BTW, am I missing something or does Twitter have no way of reporting abuse?
You can report spam to Twitter by following @spam and sending them a direct message with the @name of the spammer.
I haven’t had much spam … but I haven’t been as active on Twitter as I once was … I’m about to be on it more and I’ll definitely be blocking any spammers that come my way. Thanks for the “heads up” *SmiLes* Suzanne
I don’t autofollow anyone so I think that helps cut down spam in my main stream.
I also use Tweetdeck so an @’s are placed in 1 column & can easily be spotted. Then if it is junk from a bot, I click to block & report right then. I’m done & move on with my day.
I just don’t let the garbage bother me, it’s so easy to just block or unfollow. Out of all the social sites online Twitter is one of the easiest to avoid spam (IMHO).
I see this is an issue for many and as mentioned you can block bots but only after they have sent you something. This is usually fine but in some case like in my example i would of preferred not o have gotten the tweet in the first place.
I would never use an auto follower as it will just make you follow all the spam as well.
Sorry about that Loel…
Seems like Twitter needs to clamp down on the bots, because I do think that there are just too much. The automated messages are really the biggest nuisance to me.