While You Were Gone, Daily

Twitter Spam

There is a lot of spam on Twitter. And there are a lot of people complaining about the spam on Twitter. Many of those people point out that it would be easy for Twitter to detect this spam, because, in the vast majority of cases, spam accounts on Twitter have very few followers and vomit out hundreds of near-identical tweets at a time. Often they haven’t even changed their avatar from the default egg.

But I wonder if Twitter’s inaction is maybe deliberate. Because if they actually implemented some kind of auto-spam detection, then the spammers would inevitably up their game and create more intelligent, less obvious spam accounts.

And that, in turn, would make it harder for me to see at a glance whether a slightly mysterious 140 character @-reply is from a spam account or not. I can even envisage a situation where I cannot actually tell whether a reply is spam or not without clicking on a link in the tweet. And that is a situation I don’t want to have to deal with.

So kudos to you Twitter. Your utter failure to tackle spam is making my life easier.