3 Steps To Stop Spammers On Twitter

July 22, 2009 in Twitter with 12 Comments

spammerSpam on Twitter has been on my mind a lot lately.  It could be the influx of unwanted replies that I talked about earlier, or the very positive actions by the Twitter team yesterday to purge known accounts, or the constant stream of “get more followers today” that I see. No matter, spam on Twitter is only going to get worse before it (hopefully) gets better.  Anywhere people gather electronically, unscrupulous marketers will find a way to put get rich schemes or magic blue pills that promise a lifetime of pleasure information in front of us against our will.  Spam isn’t just for email anymore.

We can work as a community to help slow its advance however, and I want to tell you the very simple way I do my part and ask you to do the same with just a couple of easy steps.

How To Quickly And Easily Slow Down Spam

  1. Help Fight Spam On Twitter

    Help Fight Spam On Twitter

    Download and use Tweetdeck. I’ve talked about this great Adobe Air app a couple of times, and I have it open pretty much all day long.  You’ll need it for this very specific task, so go get it here.

  2. Find the spammers. Use the filter button at the bottom of the “All Friends” column, it’s the funny looking one that appears to be an arrow pointing at two balls. Type in the word you want to filter for, in this case I selected “followers” because I see a lot of posts that say “I became a member of this AWESOME site that gets you TONS of followers”. This filter will include anybody that says “followers” so proceed with caution.  I usually click on their profile, and 90% of the time it’s the same message over and over and over again.  SPAM!
  3. Block and report them! Mouse over the avatar and four icons will appear; select the one that looks like a snowflake in the lower right corner, then choose User–>Block & Report Spam.  This will remove this person from your timeline and then send a direct message to @spam that the user should be suspended.  One click, two actions!  I don’t know the algorithm used by Twitter, but I’m guessing when a certain number of people report an account it is automatically suspended pending investigation.

That’s it!  I see a lot of these types of spammers show up in my stream because I occasionally (but not always) turn on auto-following so that I can reciprocate for those that follow me.  Why I do this is a subject for another post, but unfortunately that method gets the bad with the good.  It should also be noted that you can block people on their individual Twitter pages, and you can report spam by sending an @ or DM to the spam account, but I find this method quick and easy.

If you have any tips or tricks for getting rid of spam, I would love to here them! Send me an @ or leave a note in the comments.

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About Matt Singley: I run this joint. Always looking for feedback, and if there is something you want me to write about, just let me know! Thanks for stopping by.


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  • http://dregar.tumblr.com Andre Siregar

    Matt, I think a lot of those tweets come from accounts that are hijacked. In other words, the owners of the accounts send the “get more followers” tweets unknowingly.

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  • Fekona Moonlight

    Hello I fell for it once now they use my account to spam now I cannot stop it what should I do I do not want to be banned for spamming I just failed to read the TOS O.O now they will not stop using my account

  • Fekona Moonlight

    ok for all that was a victim of that spamming dellimma there is a way to opt-out if you accidentally signed up for it there is a link on the bottom of the page that says opt-out :)

  • http://www.senderok.com Allen MacCannell @ SenderOK

    Wouldn’t you know…I just did this in Tweetdeck and found no violators out of 800 followers @senderok.

    Not one person had said the word “followers”. I found one person used the word “money” a lot but a check of his timeline showed he wasn’t a spammer either.

    This is because we don’t follow back before checking to see if a new follower is a spammer. We would be at about 1600 followers if we didn’t block spammers automatically (we do this to stop them from churning = unfollowing and following over and over again).

    I guess this means that spammers really stand out from the pack. I would have thought that a few, perhaps even a dozen out of 800, would have tricked us into following them, but that apparently didn’t happen.

  • http://twitter.com/mattsingley Matt Singley

    @Allen…That’s excellent! Good on you! I hope you can prevent future spammers from slipping thru as well.

  • http://www.virtuallyready.com Lisa Duhamel

    Yes, VERY tired of the “more followers / make $$” junk. Excellent advice – Thanks so much, Matt.

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  • http://www.dtweeterreviews.com Andre

    You might want to ckeck an experiment I did a while back. Just check a twitter account called @RU4Real. Cheers.

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  • http://www.w3roi.com Dan Grossman

    For anyone that signed up for one of those sites and can’t get them to stop sending the spam through your Twitter account, just change your password. You didn’t give them API access, you gave them your Twitter password. Change your Twitter password and they can’t tweet from your account.

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