Twitter, like many things online, falls victim to spammers. These are people who will aggressively follow and unfollow people to try and build up their own follower number so when they send out their spammy twitter update it reaches as many people as possible.
Sadly, these updates can range from irritating messages to those with links which point to harmful phishing or malware websites.
Twitter posted the above graph on its blog (http://blog.twitter.com/) to show that they are combating spam but this has raised questions as it is only a percentage figure.
It is widely known that Twitters numbers are growing each month, for example in January 2009 the number of people accessing Twitter from mobile devices was 1,051,000. In January 2010 it was 4,700,000. A 347% change over 12 months.
Although this is only for visits from mobile devices it does show the growth Twitter had during 2009.
This poses the question to whether Twitter is managing to reduce the number of spam accounts, as the graph is only a percentage is the number of spam tweets being reduced or is there the same number and the growth of “proper” Twitter accounts pushing this number down?
Also what needs to be taken into account are the various ways people can tweet, no longer is it just from a the twitter website or from a mobile app, people can now update their status when they favourite a video on YouTube or post a high score direct from certain video games. These tweets, although annoying to some people, aren’t classed as spam which increases the percentage of normal tweets and pushes the spam percentage down.
This article is taken from the April edition of the interaction newsletter. In one of the articles, Dan Alderson wrote a piece about Twitter fighting back against spam.
