Guess I’m just used to e-mail spam. It’s just always there and Spam Bayes does a pretty decent job of taking care of it.
But Twitter mention spam is more irritating. Probably just because it’s relatively new, but irritating anyway.
For those that aren’t Twitter types, any time that somebody puts @yourusername is a tweet it shows up in your feed as a mention. The idea is that you can tweet directly to somebody and they’ll get the public message.
But what’s showing up, and it seems to be getting worse over the past few weeks, is spam. The normal spam attack is to put a shortened link along with as many @mentions as will fit in the tweet. That link then goes out to the mention list of anyone mentioned with the hopes they’ll follow the link to see why they were mentioned.
It’s pretty well understood that you shouldn’t follow links in e-mails from people you don’t know. But it seems like that hasn’t quite clicked through for Twitter yet. Don’t know what the solution is, but in the back and forth game between spammers and providers it seems like spammers are winning right now.
Be First to Comment