Comments on: Is Twitter Winning the War on Spam? Our Stats Do Not Support this Assertion

By: Savannah

Savannah — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 02:31:41 +0000

I don’t know how much there is, but I know the spam there is disheartening. I use twitter for my non-profit work and when I recently ran a search on “adult literacy” the first 3 pictures to pop up were porn bots with severely inappropriate pictures. What’s a NFP professional to do?

By: Doug Braun

Doug Braun — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 20:01:39 +0000

Agreed. Both are valid measures of spam “stuff” as a percentage of its respective total.

The 83,000 (and growing) spammy followers that TwitSweeper.com has found is 5% of the 1.7 million followers that TwitSweeper has checked thus far.

I guess you could ask yourself if (motivated/automated) spammers would tweet more frequently or less frequently than the average Twitter user, if you wanted to look at or convert the “percentage of followers” measure into a percentage of tweets.

Yes, two different ways of measuring spamminess as a percentage of a total. We just don’t think that spam on Twitter, in any measure, is yet under control nor that it is a low as 1%. The TwitSweeper numbers don’t seem to support such a conclusion.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 17:01:28 +0000

Two different stats: Twitter is counting messages as a percent of total, you’re counting users as a percent of your subset of total.

I’m not saying one is more accurate than the other, just that they’re different.