What's up with all the Twitter spam?
From the moment Twitter made the public timeline searchable, the spam followers have been out in droves. If you mention a product name, that company begins following you. If you name a problem, someone claiming to have a solution begins following you. If you tweet about a job position, someone who’s unemployed starts following you. For the most part, this doesn’t really bother me that much. What does bother me, however, is the ever increasing number of MySpace-esque pornography spam followers I’ve been getting lately.
It seems like at least once a day I get an email saying “[insert name] is now following you”, I click on the link to at least load the profile, and I’m taken to a twitter user page that 1) has no photo, 2) only has one or two posts, 3) the post(s) reads “click here to see my pics [insert TinyURL]“, and 4) the account has thousands of followers. I honestly don’t know what bothers me more. The fact that an obvious spammer account is now following me, or that the bastards somehow have thousands of followers.
Come on people, who’s actually following this crap? I mean, it’s painfully obvious that it’s a spammer looking for click-throughs. They’re clearly not actually posting content (obscene or otherwise). I mean I thought the whole point of twitter (and I’m sure this will be highly contested) was to follow people you were interested in. I really can’t see the point in following a profile account that is never going to post anything after that initial click-through bait. I just don’t get it. Can someone please explain it to me?
posted by Christopher Schnese
