If you’ve spent any amount of time on Twitter, you’ve likely received a TrueTwit validation direct message. It says something like “Nelly Nameless uses TrueTwit validation service. Please validate your account.”
If you think this practice is okay, you need a Twitter direct message refresher. And when you’re done reading THAT, we’ll tell you why this “harmless annoyance” (aka TrueTwit) is anything but.
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There’s lots of spam on Twitter – particularly when it comes to direct messages (DMs).
There was so much in fact, that Twitter had it’s own @spam account!
But not anymore. Twitter has shut it down. Maybe it felt it was just adding to the noise . . . like the spam it was trying to combat.
Twitter’s latest fun feature, the line break, has yet to catch on with mainstream Tweeple – but it will.
And when it does, it may break Twitter.
Hackers and phishers and spammers and zombies are always coming up with ways to get your personal information, but Twitter wants you to know that when you receive an email from Twitter.com it’s a the real deal. Probably.
“OMG!! I just saw the CRAZIEST video of you on YouTube! [URL]”
“Wow, 24 people are viewing my Twitter profile right now! Find out how many are on yours [URL]”
“I spent 167 hours on Twitter. Find your number now! [URL]”
Sound familiar? Make you shudder? These are the tweets of spammers, spreading once every few weeks through Twitter like a disease. But they’re also pretty compelling, and sound almost legitimate, especially when they’re tweeted from a friend’s account. And that’s because they have years, and years, and years of practice to get it just right.
Twitter has seen a spate of spammy, scammy tweets proliferate through its network lately. It’s a good idea to arm yourself with a solid defense against these type of tweets, so you don’t accidentally click on a scammer’s link and find yourself embroiled in a battle against malware.
We’ve got five clues that you’re reading Twitter spam, so you can avoid being caught in the net.
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Twitter is doing a lot to combat spam. The dedicated @spam and @safety teams work their little cotton socks off identifying and removing suspicious-looking tweets and accounts, and there are many ways that users can help out, either by reporting spam directly to Twitter, or using a third party app.
However, it’s not enough. It seems like you can’t comment on anything that’s popular and in the mainstream on Twitter – iPads, iPhones, Starbucks, BMW and KFC Double Down sandwiches (just me?) – without getting a loosely-related, keyword-alerted tweet from a spambot a few moments later. And while it’s certainly true that users can and should be playing their part in battling this menace, it simply isn’t viable that we have to rely on Twitter to then manually take care of everything for us.
No, what we desperately need are email-like spam filters on Twitter. And we need them now.
The roots of spam, which is the use of electronic systems to send unsolicited, bulk messages, can be traced back to the mid 1990s, when the internet first started to become affordable to the general public.
Beginning with email, spam rapidly spread to new technologies, such as instant messaging, newsgroups and mobile phones. As social networks such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter became increasingly popular, spam quickly found a new home.
Numbers are on the rise, too. Last year, the estimated figure for total spam messages sent across all technologies was seven trillion. But what is social media spam, and how can you spot it?
If you follow iconic Twitter account @TweetSmarter, you have no doubt noticed the abundance of scams and spam hitting Twitter lately. But while TweetSmarter tries to alert you to the latest scams, they can’t cover it all – which is why Twitter itself needs to step up its spam-fighting efforts.
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I know, I know. You’ve got to go through your email, clean up the living room before company arrives and then there’s the matter of that stack of receipts you should really sort for taxes… but I promise it won’t take too long to clean up your twitter feed by using any of the following tools.
To really get the most out of your fall cleaning, remove people that are no longer on twitter and unfollow those who only talk about how much they love to shop or recount every moment of their day (“I am going to pick up lunch now, then I’m hitting the gym. Be back in an hour.”).
Here’s how: Read more
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