Fight Twitter Spam With Unfollow Filters
At SocialToo, my biggest priority is to do all that we can to make Twitter a better, more “social” place for you. Our goal is to do all we can to enable you to focus on connecting with your friends and building relationships, while we handle the rest. Unfortunately, with those that abuse the system and seek to solely focus on gaining followers, it gets harder to do so.
One of the most heavily-used techniques for gaining followers by spammers is to follow people on Twitter, then, quickly unfollow them once those people auto-follow them back. Some people do this via services like SocialToo.com, while others do it manually, but regardless, it’s easy to gain a lot of followers you could potentially target for spam in the future using this technique. I’ve referred to this flaw in Twitter’s system a “free no-reply address” given to each user that joins Twitter.
Last week we launched a feature enabling you to block automatic DMs from other SocialToo accounts. Through this feature, only those that want to receive auto-generated DMs will receive them, providing more targeted marketing, and less unwanted messages for those that are annoyed by the feature. Tonight, I’m proud to announce a new feature that will further this effort to ward off spam on Twitter. I think this is game changing.
Starting tonight, if you log into your SocialToo.com account and click on the “Admin” tab, you’ll see a new link on the left titled, “Unfollowing Preferences”. You still have the usual features of being able to unfollow all those that unfollow you, or just leave them alone, but we’re adding one new feature. Now, if you opt to enable it, you can specify that we unfollow anyone who unfollows you within the first “x” number of days after they follow you. We default this to 1, as that is common for spammers, but you can fine-tune it for your needs.
Also starting tonight, we are defaulting this to “on” for all new SocialToo.com users in an effort to further fight these types of spamming efforts on Twitter. Existing users will keep their existing settings, so please go in and adjust this if you are already a user. We plan on expanding this even further in the future with some free, and possibly some premium features, but now you can feel safe that, so long as you and your friends are on SocialToo, Twitter will be a less-spammy place! So go out and invite your friends, encourage them to switch to SocialToo.com to discourage these spammers from using this technique. The more of you that use SocialToo, the more effective we will be at fighting this technique!
Photo Credit: freezelight
That is a top idea, I like the random nature of twitter befriending but it is annoying to be targetted by spammers who you wouldn'totherwise follow. Tx
Comment by Artsmonkey1 — January 10, 2009 @ 7:10 am
Awesome! This is great for people that use auto-follow! I remember back in the day all these scripts didn't exist, and a tell-tale sign of a spammer was a lot of followed, but not many followers, now they seem to blend in with the “Twitterati” class. I agree that this is a game changing feature!
Comment by Joseph McLaughlin — January 10, 2009 @ 12:14 pm
Now that sounds like an awesome feature! So many spammers do that; it's annoying. Nice to have this available.
Comment by Voyagerfan5761 — January 11, 2009 @ 2:56 pm
so many can on the photo make me scared. Actually we have to educate those who are like to do spamming that their activity do not give them any better.
Comment by inventory management software — January 16, 2009 @ 11:36 am
I unfollowed a lot of people on twitter simply because they were doing multiple same twits over and over again.. and those kinds of things really piss me off.
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Comment by golfman_story — May 15, 2009 @ 3:15 pm
Awesome! This would make twitter members would surely love it.
Comment by Miami SEO — May 26, 2009 @ 11:54 pm
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Pingback by Cut Down on Spam With Lists and Filters on SocialToo | The SocialToo Blog — June 1, 2009 @ 3:51 pm
As I know, twitter is also targeted by spammers and phishers that try to steal your account. Keep your eyes open.
Comment by fraud prevention — June 3, 2009 @ 10:38 am
I hate spammers. Great idea I'm just now really getting my feet wet with disqus. I am really loving the way it integrates with twitter and the other web 2.0 social platforms.
Comment by afallison — June 8, 2009 @ 9:20 pm
Twitter had been really popular with all those “Follow” stuff well manyt people are using twitter as a marketing tool
Comment by lean automation — June 18, 2009 @ 1:01 am
It seems that twitter is full with scams and phishing.
Just my opinion.
Comment by fraud prevention — June 26, 2009 @ 3:04 pm
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