Not too long ago, spam on Twitter was quickly becoming a serious issue that made searching for any popular topic on the service’s own search engine almost pointless. Spammers would regularly hijack popular terms by polluting the search results with nonsensical tweets that included the popular keyword and a link to a spam site. Since Twitter started implementing better spam controls last year, however, the number of spam messages on the service has gone down dramatically. According to the latest data, the percentage of spam tweets per day is now down to under 1%.
According Twitter’s chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury, the company’s Trust and Safety team is “constantly battling against spam to improve the Twitter experience and we’re happy to report that it’s working.” Between May and October 2009, the percentage of daily of spam messages on Twitter regularly exceeded 9% and spiked to over 10 on a few days. As Twitter’s primary monetization strategy currently involves selling access to its firehose stream to search providers like Google and Microsoft, it is definitely in the company’s best interest to keep the number of spam messages as low as possible.
Report a Spammer
If you want to help Twitter in its fight against spam, remember that you report a spammer directly to Twitter‘s anti-spam team from every user’s profile page. Just look for the “report for spam” link in the right sidebar or in the drop-down actions menu.
