Twitter Fight Back Against Spammers

Twitter is becoming more and more popular at the moment, but recently they’ve had a lot of problems in relation to spam. Unfortunately, nearly all sites get flooded with spam each and every day but when a site is as big as Twitter (around 150 million active users), you can expect a lot of spam to deal with there! If you’re on Twitter you’ve probably seen plenty of spammy tweets by now and since you’re so used to it you probably don’t even notice it anymore. However, Twitter aren’t going to leave these spammers to ruin one of the most popular social networking sites in the world.

Twitter has decided to bring the law into the equation. Now, you might be wondering how a site can stop people (or bots!) posting messages on the site and Twitter believes that it has a good idea. Their plan is to bring the people who have made these tools that were specifically designed in order to spam Twitter to court in San Francisco. The only problem with this is that there are probably hundreds, if not thousands of different tools available online to do tasks such as this but at the moment Twitter have chosen the 5 most well-known developers of these tools to bring to court. They believe that if they make these developers shut their tools down it’ll stop other people from using them and therefore reduce the amount of spam on Twitter.

It sounds great, doesn’t it? However, we feel as if Twitter could be wasting their time and money on this case for a number of reasons. Firstly, if some of the tools get shut down there will more than likely by loads of other tools that people can use instead, so it’s probably a waste of time. Secondly, we’re sure that there are other developers that are working on more advanced tools so that they can use Twitter for their spam, it’s never going to stop completely. However, the one good thing about this court case is that it should stop some people from developing tools such as this. After all, the people who make these tools are often very talented and they could make other tools that people might like even more.

Overall, this is great news for 99.9% of people that just want to use the internet and enjoy it. It’s not great news for people that take advantage of spamming techniques though! It’s clear to us that Twitter has a massive problem with spam, especially since around 2% of tweets in 2010 were spam according to The Wall Street Journal. So, hopefully we won’t see as many “Click on this link to get Justin Bieber’s new song for free” type of tweets in the future, fingers crossed!