Jennyfer, I Won’t Follow You! Ever.
I’m a moderate Twitter user. A couple of tweets a day, sometimes announcing new blog posts, sometimes engaging in conversations. This evening I managed to finally get some free time to enjoy my Twitter account.
The minute I started tweeting, in other words became active, I received 3 fried request. 2 out of these 3 requests were made by new accounts under the name “Jennyfer”, following about 2000 users.
Every account like this has one or two tweets maximum and all sound like this:
- I’ve made $6000 last night with ‘Some name’;
- $15.000 overnight. Click here to find out how.
It’s easy to see that these are spam accounts, and yet they average about 10 followers.
So, when I get a request from one of these accounts, what are my choices? Let’s see:
- Ignore the request;
- Block the user.
But what about my desire to actively fight spam accounts? What if I don’t want to “block” the user and protect myself? What if I want to report the user and protect everyone else?
I really think that Twitter needs a “Report spam” button and some text filters as most of the phrases these spam accounts use are standard presets.
So, Twitter, will you help the community actively defend itself?
Update: Until such options will be – if they will ever be – integrated, the one alternative is to follow Twitter’s spam dedicated account @spam, and report spam to them.
-
- Spread the love!
- Digg
- StumbleUpon
- Delicious
- Fast & Free RSS updates?
- Join the 1,572 subscribers NOW!
Loading ...
I couldn’t agree with you more!
Good idea – twitter should include a report spam button
I completely agree with you. There are way too many spam accounts on Twitter. It is time to start reporting them but it would be nice if we could just click a button.
They do have a report spam button.
You @spam the name of the person
Stanley, you have to agree that a “Report spam(mer)” on the profile page would be a lot quicker than copying the account name from the email, going to Twitter and sending it via @spam.
You can’t escape spam.
Only Chuck Norris can
I have seen a whole load of these… Getting annoying but you can see why they do it, they must be promoting affiliate programs and on average 400 out of the 2000 will click.
Unfortunately, this kind of accounts are spreading fast. I just ignore them most of the times, but they should also be reported. Yes, little time, but otherwise they can nag people on an on.
This is bad, but your not the only one facing Twitter spam. Its all over the place and thankfully Twitter suspends the account asap.
Yeh, this is a big problem with Twitter. But then again, spam is everywhere.
But the way that Twitter works makes it easily exploitable. I mean, so many people create their Twitter accounts for promotion because the platform makes it easy to connect with many others and send out information. The people that we call ’spammers’ are just worse than others at disguising their attempts for self (or affiliate) promition… lol.
I agree with you…like othe social networking sites Twitter should have a report spam button. Some time back, sort of same thing happened with me and really wanted to report Twitter.
By the way, i really liked your blog
I agree with you whole-heartedly. My only reservation with the report spam button is the people who make it their over-zealous mission in life to find and report spam. It would be great if the did just that, but often times they allow personal feelings to cause some false reports.
I guess we’ll have to use the @spam method till they can get ahold of a better system.
BTW, I can only assume that those 10 followers the Twitter spam account had were auto-follows.
Keep up the great posts and best of continued success!
- @webestate