Thursday, 18 June 2009
The Solution To Twitter Spam - Make Them Pay
Along with gaining the attention of celebrities, mainstream media and millions of internet-savy users, Twitter attracted a huge amount of attention from spammers.
Technology expert Bernard Moon recently wrote a post on the popular social media news website Mashable exploring the issue of increased spam on Twitter, according to him
Spammers are becoming more prevalent on Twitter and the “scammer” subset seems to be increasing the fastest.
He outlines three key types of Twitter spam
- Twitomercials – Legitimate companies shamelessly promoting their products
- Straight Cons – Usually involving a deposed African dictator and a dodgy bank account, thankfully most of us know to avoid these
- Clueless Cons – People trying to conceal blatant sales pitches among seemingly ‘normal’ twitter feeds. One example I came across all too many times was the ‘I just got a new laptop’ tweet linking people to a laptop competition of some sorts.
Unfortunately, Moon believes these are just the tip of the Iceberg. He’s not alone in this conviction, a recent PC World article claimed that
The popular microblogging site [Twitter] has become a hot spot for spammers intent on carpet bombing users with the usual pitches for government grants, debt-reduction services, and penile-enhancement pills.The article goes on to mention a report by Christopher Peri, CEO of Twitfilter where he indicates that as much as 10% of all ‘tweets’ on Twitter are spam.
One particular technique is for spammers or over-eager companies to follow thousands of people on Twitter automatically (using such web-based tools as Twollow) simply with the intention of gaining attention. It has to be said however that some users don’t consider this specific approach as spam, more a case of ‘aggressive selling’.
As these articles and many others demonstrate, Twitter spam is a very serious problem. The question now seems what to do to combat this spam.
Although Twitter has been working hard to reduce spam, it’s currently fighting a losing war. So what is a social media phenomenon to do?
One suggested solution for combating the growth of spam is to increase the ‘friction’ of using Twitter. The well know marketing guru, Seth Godin, summarised this idea in a post earlier this year. His belief is that the lack of friction in email is killing this medium and Twitter is next.
With email, too many people can all too easily spam thousands, and thousands of other people. A ‘stamp’ for each email sent would greatly reduce the motivations of email spammers, in the case of twitter, this could primarily be achieved by charging people to tweet or for setting up a Twitter profile.
I don’t believe this would have to be a signification charge, say something between $20 and $60 dollars for an annual subscription to the service. This would be a price range most users could afford, however spammers who typically set up multiple profiles would be deterred by costs that would accumulate from running their spam profiles.
I can hear some Twitter users groaning about limiting people’s access and soiling the ‘free’ nature of Twitter. Ideally it would remain free for users, but the reality is that many people are growing frustrated with the deluge of Twitter spammers, diluting updates, twitter search results and follower lists. This might be the only way to save Twitter and ensure that the thing that brings people there in the first place content and interaction are preserved. Why not learn from the mistakes made with email and build in this bold anti-spam safeguard from now?
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