Twitter Cracking Down on Refollowers

13 Points

When blogger Louis Gray realized he was getting slammed with Twitter spam, he didn't take it sitting down. He started snapping screenshots, analyzing logs and eventually put together a package large enough to bring to Twitter's attention. His complaint? Automated refollows, a technique where spammers join a popular Twitter's follower list, then unfollow and refollow at particular times every day.

What's the point of refollowing? It's all about eyeballs. Everytime you follow someone, your Twitter account shoots to the top of their follower list. If they've got a LOT of followers, that means you can put a lot of eyeballs on your avatar, and you're bound to gain some followers simply by being noticed. Do that every day for a high-volume Twitter account, and you can put together a pretty big followers list pretty quickly.

That's what @Politicalupdate and @twtr.us were doing - at least, until Gray blogged about the irritance of refollows. After his sleuthing, Twitter suspended those accounts, and bloggers and Twitterers alike sang Gray's praises.

Twitter spam of all types has become more and more of a problem. The microblogging platform's stubborn refusal to install any kind of automation-busting tools (like a CAPTCHA) and the openness of their API means that if people can find a hole, they've got free reign to exploit it until someone brings it to Twitter's attention.

The good news? Twitter hears your woes. If you can put together evidence in the way that Gray did, and put it in front of Twitter, they'll take action - which, although not as good as pre-emptive spam prevention, is at least a sign that they are aware of the problems and that they care to help solve them.

What about you, Tweeple? Anyone out there had follow/refollow spam? Anyone out there a secret refollower spammer?

Mar 10, 2009
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Comments
Twittown Comments
Submitted by Rob on Mar 26, 2009 12:20 says:

And yet, here you are, frittering your time away talking about how you won't fritter your time away with twitter. Is that, like, meta-frittering?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mar 25, 2009 21:14 says:

Who cares about a blogging platform obviously designed for the ADD-challenged? Oh yes, it's all about connecting the dolts. I forgot. I have no love for spammers but I have less love for people who are so addled that all they can write is 140 character sound bytes.

I am not a friiter your time away with twitter fan. I found this whine-site doing a search for a twitter appliance for website--not my own.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mar 22, 2009 06:42 says:

The worst part of this is many are using these tools to build large followings in order to build credibility. One is launching a product soon on - guess what - how she got 7000 followers in 7 days.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mar 20, 2009 08:35 says:

I take my time and get some tweets and then get on with my day. I love tweeter but that's horrible to see cheating like that going on infront of our very own eyes.

http://twitter.com/clouds2009list

Submitted by Rob on Apr 6, 2009 13:16 says:

You're right about auto-follows, but I've gotta point out that "RE-follows" are different from auto-follows; auto-follows scan other users follow lists and automatically add members; re-follows follow, unfollow and follow again to "bounce" to the top of the follow list...

But you're right, auto-following is pretty sketchy too.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mar 20, 2009 08:09 says:

I set up a Twitter account recently for a web site. To get started I followed several of the "big name" Twitter accounts. Within minutes (perhaps even seconds actually) I was followed by several other "big name" Twitter accounts that I had not added. What was so strange was that I never added them and the odds they would pick out an obscure new account with only a handful of followers are astronomical. People complain about spammers but I think many of the big name accounts are doing something very similar themselves.

Submitted by Chris (not verified) on Mar 20, 2009 01:43 says:

OK, so say someone follows me, then unfollows me, then follows me again... why should I care? I don't pay attention to that, and I certainly don't run around like a 3rd-grade tattletale reporting them.

I pay attention to my DMs, replies, and what people are tweeting- no need to become a vigilante or get bent out of shape about how others use Twitter.

I've started blocking people who publicly complain about things like this, since it's annoying to read.

Submitted by Mikki T (not verified) on Mar 18, 2009 08:18 says:

I'm still new to twitter but I keep my follow messages in a separate folder as they are received. I noticed I had more e-mails than the follower count on twitter, so I sorted by subject (the @name leads the subject) & saw a lot of people who'd followed more than once. Now I know the reason! Thanks! I'll have to go through now & report them.

@mikkitphd

Submitted by Kelly Arellano (not verified) on Mar 15, 2009 08:02 says:

And I thought it was just me! :)

Submitted by Chris (not verified) on Mar 20, 2009 01:40 says:

That's some pretty lame logic there! So if somebody is following 1000s of people, they aren't paying attention to anyone? Who are you to make that judgment?

You must be new to Twitter, since I can think of several people who follow many 1000s and interact with them.

Would you prefer someone who is following 10 people and has 20,000 following him?

Submitted by Justin (not verified) on Mar 18, 2009 03:47 says:

I don't think it's true that people following thousands of people can't keep uo with tweets. Applications like TweetDeck make is super easy to filter tweets and manage your friends via groups. The more people you follow, the more information you have access to. It's amazing how much stuff you can pick up (links, blogs, etc) from following a lot of people.

I just started following a lot more people and the things I have discovered were far worth the effort it takes to keep up.

Submitted by SharkGirl (not verified) on Mar 13, 2009 01:51 says:

I was wondering how come I was getting followers like that. I didn't know their avatars move to the top. I thought avatars appeared in order of when they added, but I didn't pay attention to it.

My rule of thumb in following people who follow me is look at the number of people they're following. If they have a high number of people they're following, then chances are, they could care less what I have to say and they are only marketing. I don't add them to my following list, and they usually stop following me in a very few days.

When someone is following thousands of people, there is no way they can keep up with everyone's tweets, which tells me they only follow to promote their marketing.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mar 12, 2009 05:10 says:

I've had 10 people follow me, of whom two were obvious spammers - I'd watch their follow list grow by hundreds an hour and they'd have only one message to the effect of, Visit My Web Site.

I didn't find that annoying - I just blocked them - but you know, this stuff accretes. I could imagine leaving for two months and coming back to find 100 spammer/followers.

Part of the attraction of social media is how fast you can build followings, but that's exactly what makes the spamming problem so fluid.

Thanks for the info about @SPAM.

Submitted by Steve Pohlit (not verified) on Mar 11, 2009 01:22 says:

I have a growing list of follower that exceed 3,000 and have no real problem with spam. Twitter's posture is clear and accurately presented by Cathy Web Savvy PR in her comments here.

Submitted by Cathy Web Savvy PR (not verified) on Mar 10, 2009 21:45 says:

Thanks for the info/post; am glad Twitter is cracking down on people who game the system. One nice thing about Twitter that lots of folks don't know, is that if you have someone you suspect of being a spammer following you, you can send a tweet with their username to @SPAM on Twitter and it will be looked into.

A few weeks ago, I was participating in a busy Twitter chat. And someone joined in with a funny name - and was posting snarky, but not obnoxious stuff, at first. It go worse as the evening wore one. People were complaining to the guest moderator. After a fairly childish, but offensive tweet, I copied the username and offensive tweet & sent it to @SPAM -his account was deleted in 10 minutes or less, at 10:30/ pm-ish EST. That's more responsive than I expected!

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