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Finally Twitter Starts Purging Spammers

Posted: May 7, 2008

Twitter has started shutting down the accounts of users who abuse the service to spam legitimate Twitter users.

Spam isn’t a huge issue for most Twitter users; spam accounts are usually pretty easy to spot, and users can easily unfollow or block spammers the moment they are spammed. Twitter spammers usually aren’t that sophisticated either, usually taking the name of a well known person (with a preference for Presidential Candidates) and adding a number to it.

According to Erick over at TechCrunch, the change today is that Twitter is now deleting the accounts of spammers where as previously (and unknown until today) crippling them so that they can’t be follow.

With most companies you’d ask why it has taken until now to act on the problem, but this is Twitter; not only are they still busy trying to keep the service up, they might still be working on a business plan as well (I’m presuming they’ll eventually have one, aside from flip or flop).

Category: Technology
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Posted: May 7, 2008
Duncan Riley

By Duncan Riley








Comments


2 Archived Responses to “ Finally Twitter Starts Purging Spammers ”

  1. Mike Bogle
    May 7, 2008

    About time they did something about that. As you say it wasn’t really obtrusive, but letting spammers go unmoderated doesn’t reflect positively on any service provider.

  2. Tom Reynolds
    May 8, 2008

    I think the tactic they had before was better frankly- here’s why.

    UInder the “blocked outbound” model, the spammer will continue (for a time) to try to hammer away with their spam as they will not know that they have been blocked. That gives the other users a respite.

    But if they ban-hammer the account, the spammer starts over. And over. etc.

    Tom