Introduced in July, 2010, TwitSweeper’s new feature has reviewed over one million shortened links to detect spam,  malware or phishing sites. “We see this as a growing problem”, states Doug Braun, President of Emerge2 Digital.  “To date, this new feature has already flagged over 1,900 bad links, with more to come.”

According to Dasient, over 1.3 million web sites host malware, usually without their knowledge and often due to third-party widgets, advertising or applications on their websites being hacked.

“As we all know, where spammers see an opportunity to make money or disrupt commerce, they’ll take advantage of it.” Fortunately, TwitSweeper is slamming the door shut on Twitter malware and spam.

TwitSweeper blocks Malware and Spam with new tool is a post from The Dustpan - Discussing Twitter Spam

Here’s the issue. Our stats don’t support this assertion.

In fact, our numbers suggest that spammers are alive and well on Twitter. How do we arrive at this conclusion? In December of 2009 we launched TwitSweeper. Its only function is to detect undesirable followers (spam and spammers), identify them, and list them so TwitSweeper users can choose to remove and block them. It does this very well.

Here’s what we know.

To date TwitSweeper has checked more than 1.7 million followers. It has detected and flagged more than 83,000 followers as being spam or spammers. This suggests that almost 5% of all the followers we’ve checked are spammy.

The next question is: What is Spam?

The universal answer seems to be: “Everything I don’t want to receive from someone I don’t know.”

The problem with this definition is that it can include everything. Promoting body enhancement products is a nuisance to most, but a blessing to some. One man’s garbage is another man’s gold.

Is Twitter doing a good job going after spammers? I’m sure they are making best efforts. Are they winning the battle? It’s too early to say. Do they have spam down to 1%? Our stats certainly don’t confirm that. If our stats indicate that 5% of followers are spammers, you’ve got to know the actual number is even higher.

Conclusion: As TwitSweeper’s Spam Detection Methodology continues to improve, we see a corresponding rise in spammy followers that are found. This suggests there are more spammers out there. Whereas, Twitter’s reported 1% spam figure is merely the portion of spam that they happen to have found so far.

In the end, everyone’s objective should be to keep the Twitter ecosystem clean of spam. But we aren’t there yet.

Is Twitter Winning the War on Spam? Our Stats Do Not Support this Assertion is a post from The Dustpan - Discussing Twitter Spam

Don’t confuse your “followers” (those who have chosen to follow you) with those that you are “following.” They are two different groups of Twitter users that are associated with your Twitter account.

You should follow other Twitter users that you find interesting. The tweets from these people show up in your timeline (your Twitter feed). They should be users that provide you with information, entertainment, dialogue or whatever it is that you find interesting about them.

If you tweet about things that others find interesting, then others will find you and follow you. It’s really that simple. Over time you should build up a loyal following of users who are interested in what you have to say.

However, it all breaks down and new problems occur if you start reciprocal following.

Problem # 1 – Your Timeline

When you start manually following those that follow you, or worse yet, use a script or online service to automatically follow everyone who follows you, you immediately pollute your timeline with all the miscellaneous, unfocused topics and trivia from the gang of people who found your tweets interesting. But does that mean that you will find their tweets of value to you? All of their subject areas and personal commentaries? I don’t think so.

Now your timeline is overflowing with reams of chatter “all over the map” and tweets from the previously hand-picked people who you had chosen to follow are now all mixed in with tweets from this bunch of people from all walks of life. You’ve lost control of your timeline. Now you need to start putting your hand-picked users into lists or groups in your apps, or somehow filtering your timeline so that you can get back to the tweets from the people who you want to follow, who you want to read about. But wait, that’s what you had before you started reciprocal following. Hmmm….

Problem # 2 – Auto-DM Spam

You start getting auto-DM messages from many of these people that you reciprocal followed. Direct Messages (DM’s) are Twitter’s private messages between Twitter users. But you can only send a DM to another user, or receive one, if you are both following each other — if you both find each other’s tweets of interest.

However, online services have started to crop up that will send automatic DM’s to people after you initially follow them (e.g. “thanks for following me!”), and after you tweet certain things, and after you reply to one of their tweets, and at timed intervals, and for a variety of reasons.

It’s a two step process: They start by using online services that will automatically follow as many people as they can, anyone, not because they are interested in those people, but because they are hoping that some of these people will reciprocal follow them back – so they can then go to step two and auto-DM them! These auto-DM’s are usually very self-serving, spammy, contain links, pitches, and are extremely annoying after awhile, and you have no way of turning them off other than to unfollow those people. Of course, if you hadn’t reciprocal followed them in the first place, you would not be receiving these crazy spam DM messages at all.

Problem # 3 – Phishing Attacks

In the last few weeks, Twitter users have been hit by a large number of phishing scams. They involve a DM from a hacked Twitter account to you saying something like “Is this a picture of you? <link>” or some other hook comment and a link. Always a link. The link takes you to what looks like a Twitter login page, but it is a page on the hacker’s site. When you enter your account login info, then the hacker’s program breaks into your Twitter account and uses it to send the same scam to all of your contacts using more DM’s.

But wait, you would not have been able to receive any of those phishing DM scam messages if you hadn’t reciprocal followed all of those people (since you both need to be following each other to be able to send or receive a DM). And further, if your Twitter account ever becomes hacked for any reason, the hacker would not be able to use your account to DM your contacts if you hadn’t reciprocal followed all of them. So a double benefit of not receiving and not spreading Twitter-based phishing attacks if you don’t reciprocal follow.

Problem # 4 – Malware Attacks

A variation on Problem # 3 is the spreading of malware via a download link which is spread by DM messages using hacked Twitter accounts. As in the above, you would almost eliminate the ability to receive such DM messages from hacked followers if you are not reciprocal following, and also your account (if ever hacked) would not be able to spread any such malware to all of your followers if you are not reciprocal following.

Summary

So let’s see. We can reciprocal follow all of the people who follow us: it is nice for them and it’s a practice that used to be done in the very early years of Twitter usage when there weren’t many people using Twitter. However, with the tens of millions of users on Twitter now, and:

• all of the online services sending marketing spam
• services providing countless and useless mass followers (who are not interested in you)
• services that do automatic mass reciprocal following for you
• automatic tweeting of marketing messages by renting out your account for a few bucks (aka “sponsored tweets”)
• the proliferation of annoying, machine-generated auto-DM messages
• the phishing scams and malware being spread by DM’s, and
• the pollution of your timeline with a very low signal-to-noise ratio of meaningless trivia overpowering the occasional helpful tweet

it is long overdue to stop the ancient practice of reciprocal following that now only seems to generate useless, time-wasting noise, scams and malware to the ultimate benefit of mostly nefarious practitioners.

Agree? Disagree? Sound off in the comments…

The Evils of Reciprocal Following on Twitter is a post from The Dustpan - Discussing Twitter Spam

The universal answer seems to be: “Everything I don’t want to receive from someone I don’t know.”

So that leaves us with approximately six billion different opinions. The problem is, Viagra is a nuisance to some, a blessing to others. So who decides what are spammy or undesirable tweets?

Over the weekend I did a Twitter search for ‘twitter spam.’ The list of spam complaints from Twitter users was endless.  However, I still had no clear definition of what twitter spam was.

So we’re asking you, what might be on your list when defining spam:

• Tweets that are misleading, i.e. the tweet has nothing to do with its link
• Anyone promoting ‘how to make money online’
• Multi-level marketing promotions
• Lonely hearts club – (look at my pictures variety)
• Pornography
• Spam-robot factories
• Annoying people that tweet endlessly about mindless stuff
• Malware or viruses
• Sponsored tweets
• Corporations advertising and marketing their products and services

I would like to hear from you. What’s your definition of spam (or spammers and undesirables)?

Is twitter spam different from email spam?

How bad is twitter spam in comparison to email spam (where 80% of emails are estimated to be spam)?

Twitter Spam: Can You Block What You Can’t Define? is a post from The Dustpan - Discussing Twitter Spam

There’s no question Twitter will be used by business and corporations to get their brand message out to consumers, that’s to be expected. Dell and others are doing this very effectively right now. However, as Twitter puts it, “Twitter is what you make of it – receive a lot of information or just a tiny bit…from breaking world news to updates from friends.”

Look at the stats posted in Main by Pingdom:

• 247 billion emails on average every day
• 1.4 billion email users worldwide
• Approximately 81% of emails sent are spam

How does that compare to Twitter?

• Estimated 27.3 million tweets on Twitter per day for the month of November 2009 (Pingdom)
• RJMetrics estimates 12 to 13 million active (monthly) users at the end of 2009
• TwitSweeper stats confirm Twitter spammy followers are over 4% and growing

How big Twitter’s is going to become is anyone’s guess, but I do know we have to stop Twitter spam before it reaches email proportions.

Lots of Spam potential on Twitter (unless we stop it) is a post from The Dustpan - Discussing Twitter Spam

TwitSweeper is an “always on service.”

TwitSweeper scans your account on a regular basis. You may login to your TwitSweeper Dashboard at any time to review your statistics and the date(s) that your Twitter account was last checked. You can register multiple Twitter accounts under one TwitSweeper Dashboard. You can enable TwitSweeper to send an email when activity has taken place on any of your Twitter accounts.

Automatic or manual block – it’s your choice.

• Automatically remove spammy followers
• Remove spammy followers after a 72-hour notification to you
• Notify you to review suspect followers – Wait for you to confirm

Expand the list of spam phrases.

TwitSweeper is preloaded with thousands of phrases most often used by spammers. You can add your own phrases for maximum control. Any phrases that you add only affect your account(s).

All of this for one low annual fee.

Most services for Twitter are free. TwitSweeper is not one of them. We developed TwitSweeper because we hate being annoyed by spam and spammers. So we built the application on our servers so you don’t have to worry about downloading any apps to your computer. Our servers do the work and provide you with your personal account stats on an ongoing basis. It’s as easy as that. It depends on how you value your time and freedom. Our goal: Set it and forget it – cut down the annoyance factor, save time, make your Twitter experience easier and more enjoyable. It’s a small price to pay, but with real benefits.

You can try a free trial at http://TwitSweeper.com

TwitSweeper goes Public is a post from The Dustpan - Discussing Twitter Spam