How Twitter Anti-Spam Filter Can Clean Up The Spam

If you've used Twitter recently, there's a very good chance that you've seen what everyone on the streets is calling, Twitter Spam. Twitter opened a huge world of viral spamming to spammers advertising products such as debt-reduction services, enhancement pills, and pornography. Chances are, you've seen one of these or some other type of spam such as Get Rich Quick scheme or even "How To Get 10,000 Twitter Followers". The bad news is, it's only going to get worse.

Twitter Spam, or Twam as some refer to it as, is so bad that even Twitter acknowledges the problem and says they are making progress on the Spam. Last year, Twitter officials informed the Twitter community of "Follow Spam" which is an act of following mass numbers of people to gain attention and popularity to advertise their products or services. These users and organizations use automated programs to do so and hope that you follow them back, giving them even more "attention" and public views.

In an effort to prevent "Follow Spammers", Twitter has been working on setting up certain account limitation that limit the number of users that can follow other users. Apparently, they are still working on the formula and thus far, we haven't really seen a decline in spam on Twitter - it's been increasing.

Twitter Anti-Malware Filter?
Perhaps an anti-malware or anti-spam filter should be put in place either by Twitter or by a third party company? Twitter could easily incorporate a filter system that allows users to mark certain users and tweets as spam and with enough votes, they could create a negative Karma against that user or spammer and with enough negative karma they could prevent the user from sending tweets or even have the account flagged for suspension.

What if Twitter has no desire to moderate their site in this manner, what's the other option? I think the other option would come in the form of a third party web site offering a service to Twitter users. The site would require your Twitter credentials and with this, they could scan your tweets from the users to compile data on each user. With enough information gathered the site would be able to determine users that spam from users that do not. Certainly a lot of algorithms would have to come into play for this to work and it would have to be handled with great care.

After the database of spammers has been compiled, the user can choose to have the site automatically stop following those marked as a spammer OR have you manually decide on the users fate based on the provided information as to why the user is a spammer.

Of course, the preferred option is to have Twitter step up to the plate and offer some sort of user moderated means - after all, the users of Twitter are their most powerful tool. Human's can be the most accurate form of filtering information when you have millions of humans involved to help fight for the same cause.

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