TwitBlock Tracks Down Twitter Spammers

Security Fix’s Brian Krebs alerted me c/o Mashable to TwitBlock a little tool for Twitter users that helps you find those “followers” that aren’t really followers – the twit bots, spammers, and redirecters, in other words.

Login to TwitBlock using OAuth (no need to share your Twitter password and you can revoke authorization at any time) and start scanning your account. Immediately, it will become apparent that at least some of your followers are some kind of spammy scammer. These fake profiles will, says Krebs, “draw visitors away from your profile to adult Web sites and other dicey online destinations.” So, it’s a good idea to clear out this chaff from your account every now and then and that means finding and blocking them.

The top results when you use TwitBlock to scan your site are likely to be pr0n twitters, fake accounts that lead to adult images and websites. Now, you really don’t want to give your genuine followers the impression that you have those people among your number, unless you’re a porn star yourself, of course. So BLOCK them! TwitBlock makes it easy to block and just as easy to mark mislabeled, real followers as not spam.

Incidentally, speaking of false positives, be cautious about blocking even those who come up with a high score, as they may be genuine twitters who just happen to have followed thousands of people, got only a handful of followers, and tweeted only once…yeah, right.

The best clues as to whether several of your followers are spammers, is that they all use the same avatar, usually something salacious or odd, they will usually have a very high following to follower ratio, have tweeted perhaps only once despite a long-lived account, and are following at a high rate but being ignored by genuine twitters. TwitBlock displays these various factors (click the analyse link) and ranks putative spammers. Thankfully @sciencebase comes out at 0, but some of the worst offenders among my followers had ranks in the several hundreds…

At the time of writing I had 5114 twitter followers and with a short session on TwitBlock I had tracked down and blocked 32 obvious spammers.

Just for the record, Twitter has purges of spam accounts on its system periodically too, which often explains sudden drops in your follower account. The Twitter Counter chart below from June-July shows the effect of the most recent Twitter purge on spam accounts on @sciencebase stats.

Check out my twitter tips in the related posts below for how to decide which genuine followers to follow back.