Now that you know to identify spam from Rob’s article, 5 Key Microblogging Spam Indicators, here are two options you have to actively deal with spammers:

1. Block the offending user - This action prevents the user from being able to see your updates, and also removes them from your followers list. The main reason for doing this is so that they don’t show up as a follower. Should someone peruse your followers and see a bunch of spammers, they may not want to follow you.
2. Report the offending user - The more proactive approach to fighting spam, reporting offending users sends a message to people who have power to remove the user from the system. To report a spammer, go to twitter.com/help and fill out the form, selecting “Spam Request” in the selection menu at the top of the form. If you want to be lazy, go here and enter the spammer’s username in the top box with a short message like “user x followed me”.
3. Send a reply to @spam - Twitter’s added a new way recently to report spam publicly. You can send a message formatted like “@spam @spammer” and they’ll get the message. This way is much easier than any other method I’ve found.

Reporting spammers to Twitter gives them a chance to review the offender and remove them from the system when necessary. The fewer spammers there are, the better off we are as a whole.

These two options are focused specifically on Twitter, but if you know about ways to help defeat spam on other platforms, please share them with us in the comments.

How often do you have to block or report spam/unwanted accounts?

I believe we can play an active role in fighting spam and reducing its threat. This can be done by looking for a few key indicators before following a suspicious user account:

1. Completeness of the profile information - Profiles that only provide a name I won’t normally follow as a general rule. If there isn’t a bio or website I can view to quickly validate the account and why I should follow them then it isn’t going to happen.
2. Follower to following ratio - I don’t have a magic number, but you should do a gut check. If the numbers seem off don’t follow it.
3. Number of updates to following ratio - Once again, I don’t have a magic number, but if someone is following a thousand plus but has only posted one update you can wait. Table this account and check back in a day or two.
4. Number of updates - You might be able to bypass ratios altogether by checking the number of updates. If the account seems too new, give it 24 hours for some posts to roll in before deciding to follow.
5. Don’t blindly accept or automate follows - Accepting without some sort of check just seems insane to me. I have trouble following 200 plus accounts so lets be honest with the term “following”.

If you use these five key indicators when trying to identify an account as spam, you ought to catch most of what is out there.

Do you have other indicators you use when watching for spam? What are some tactics you have employed?

Though the mystery behind the account (@identicaupdates) still seems to be unsolved, someone set up a Twitter account that auto-posts a handful of dents from Identica over to Twitter every hour.

I was alerted to this account through my RSS feed for microblink from Twitter Search. As it turns out, we’ve had two of our dents ported over to Twitter by this account.

There has been plenty of legitimate talk on Identica about bridging your dents over to Twitter as a personal option (a topic for another day), but that would work through some sort of tie-in with your individual account, not setting up an additional account on Twitter and feeding your RSS feed across.

In fact, I particularly can’t stand individuals who use activity stream RSS feeds as their sole source of data for Twitter, especially when the medium is supposed to be about communicating and making conversation, not blasting and broadcasting everything you are doing on the web.

It seems that a lot of people aren’t keen on someone else streaming their personal feeds out onto other platforms. I’d even go out on a limb and call this account spam, based on the fact that it is just streaming content from another source without providing any real value to the community.

The easiest way to make accounts like this go away is to hit the block button or report it as spam to the Twitter team. If enough people turn the account in, they (Twitter) will likely take action.

In light of a recent wave of robot-like accounts popping up on its microblogging platform, Twitter has been aggressively ramping up its fight against spam. On August 21, they announced they had implemented a new tool that would allow them to review and suspend accounts more easily. Twitter also stated that they have hired dedicated staff to aid in this fight.

Twitter’s investment and efforts are showing progress. Just today a spam account started following me and in less than six hours (and probably quicker) this account has been suspended. With every suspension an annoyance has been temporarily stopped, saving individuals from having to block the account themselves. However, this method for suspending accounts only works after the spammer has had some impact on the community. What I find missing in this fight is what the community can be doing to protect themselves from these spam accounts from the start.

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