Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Spammers Beware- the Twitter Owl Will Suspend Your Account

Twitter appears to be cracking down on spammers. You may have discovered this after checking one of your new followers. You'll see this

Sorry, the account you were headed to has been suspended due to strange activity. Mosey along now, nothing to see here.

Of course, there could be a fair amount of Twitter members who don't consider themselves spammers. You may be wondering, "Why are they picking on me?"

Here's a quick list of Red Flags for Twitters Spam Filter:

• A "large" number (number not specified) of people block your profile.
• a large number of people write in with spam complaints for a specific profile
• aggressive following (a large number of people are followed in a short amount of time)
• extremely imbalanced follower/following ratio (no ratio example provided)
• updates consist of duplicate or repeating links and/or text

• updates consist mainly of links and not personal updates
• links in updates disguise the real content of a link given in a misleading or deceptive way.
• unauthorized "re-tweets" (poaching and posting other users' updates) passed off as original conten

Those are the factors listed on Twitter Support. Is it just me, or does it seem like many of these subjective terms leave too much room for interpretation?

Posted By Matt O'Hern at 10:42 AM
Permanent Link: Spammers Beware- the Twitter Owl Will Suspend Your Account | Comments (1)

(1) Comments on Spammers Beware- the Twitter Owl Will Suspend Your Account

The part about too many links/too few personal updates seems bizarre. Many of the best people around like to share things they've read and leave the personal stuff for mutual follow sites like Facebook.

Comments by wbw_Jeff : Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 11:31 PM

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