Don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter. While I don’t check my feed every 5 minutes, I have been known to tweet an almost excessive amount.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter. While I don’t check my feed every 5 minutes, I have been known to tweet an almost excessive amount. I follow almost every half-decent celebrity and journalist out there and have enough followers to not count myself as a complete Twitter loser. But there is one thing that is ruining my Twitter experience even more than the constant trending of the phrase ‘Beliebers’: Spam.
There are all sorts of spammers located on Twitter to sneak unwanted information and links into your timelines or personal inbox. But when it comes to classifying them, I can generally allocate my online annoyances into the following categories:
1. Link Spammers – These are the tweets about teeth whitening, herbal medicines and miracle weight loss supplements. I don’t care if your stomach went from fat to fit in a week when you started those pills. If I really cared about losing weight, I wouldn’t be sat around all day using Twitter, would I? The majority of these accounts and tweets are also phishing scams and it could only take one click for your whole twitter account to become a spam-ridden catastrophe.
2. Porn Bots – These notorious spammers with easy to spot account names, for example @Ohfellas, are constantly appearing, following you and/or direct messaging you about ‘Longer and Better Sex’ and free online porn before being shut down by Twitter. There’s not even anything you can do to stop them. By the time you go to block @sxc4yhoo their accounts been suspended and another porn bot is there to take their place. Horrific.
3. Trending tweets- These spammers stop you from reading any interesting tweets about trending topics. They take advantage of a trending topic, by using it to advertise their own taking up all the space on the topics timeline. It’s frustrating, especially if you’re using the timeline of a topic you like, to find someone new to follow.
4. @reply spammers- This type of spammer irritates me so much, causing completely irrelevant notification emails that lure me in. They tag you in their advertising posts or even worse, they reply directly to your tweets. These accounts usually get quickly suspended by Twitter, however, I assure you there are plenty more out there.
5. Human Spammers- Notably the worse type of spammers. These are real humans, not just some automated computer software. They can range from accounts created by psychotic superfans aiming to dominate the Twittersphere with news about One Direction’s latest antics to bitter loners who follow and tweet abuse to celebrities and even just your average person. These accounts are by far the hardest to get deleted as they go unnoticed by Twitter’s spam filters and the only way to stop them contacting you is by blocking and deleting them.
I hope that categorising what I think to be the most popular of the Twitter spammers will help people to find life on the Twittersphere a little less frustrating. Remember, if all else fails just block and report, block and report and there’s nothing wrong with a spam rant tweet every now and again.
