Spam on Twitter is becoming a bigger problem day by day. I’m sure you’re used to get a notification email when someone follows you, but when you get it multiple times a day from same account, then you know something fishy is going on.
As a blogger Louis Gray reports in his blog post The Newest Annoyance on Twitter: Follow and Refollow Spam, he has noticed that some accounts are constantly following and re-following him.
What’s the point of re-following?
It’s about attention. Everytime you follow someone, your Twitter account shows up at the top of their followers list. Which means that people will notice your avatar and you will most likely get new followers. If they have a lot of followers, then you will get even more attention. Do this on multiple accounts and you will get a big number of followers simply for being on top of their followers list. Those people usually try to promote a product, so they want a big audience.
What can we do about it?
Well, until Twitter adds some spam prevention, like CAPTCHA or changes their API, there’s not much we can do about it. And even that would only prevent automatic re-following. For now we can observe, collect evidence and report anything suspicious to Twitter.
Such robotic behavior is apparently not allowed. And after Louis Gray brought those accounts to Twitter’s attention, they suspended them and now Twitter is taking a closer look at re-following.
What about you? Have you encountered anything similar?
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