Spam on Twitter?
That's right. As more users enjoy using the twitter microblogging platform, spammers move to this platform too. We observed the behavior of spammers on Twitter for a while, and built a classifier to detect them. Luckily, the bots used for these purposes show some particular behavior and therefore can be identified.
We developed some heuristics to detect spam accounts, and this technique allowed us to find them with a very low false positive rate. However, spam accounts and campaigns are likely to slightly change their behavior as time passes. For this reason, we need the users' feedback in order to detect brand new campaigns, and help Twitter removing them.
We developed a bot that you can use to report spammers. You can find its Twitter page here. If you like the idea, just follow this profile and flag spammers whenever you see one. The bot accepts messages in the format:
If you think doing this is too much effort, don't worry! We developed a bookmarklet that allows you to flag spammer with just one click!
Do you want an easier way to flag spammers? Just drag our bookmarklet to your brower's bookmarks bar, and click it whenever you visit a page you think might belong to a spam bot (you need to be logged in on Twitter in order to use it).
Drag the following link to your bookmarks bar: spamdetector
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