[liberationtech] twitter spam / porn bots affecting visibility?

[Griffin Boyce]

  Yesterday, I did have a large number of spam bots follow me, but all of
them have been deleted/deactivated.  It's not too hard to pick out accounts
who are tastemakers on Twitter, and then create a custom list of trending
hashtags from there.  It does seem to be the case that the more followers
you have, the more spam you receive, which makes a little bit of sense.  I
make a point to report every bot that sends me a mention, and that seems to
help a lot.

Best,
Griffin Boyce


On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 4:24 AM, Jillian York <jilliancyork at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is an interesting thought; I heard similar ruminations from the
> #flotilla crowd and them just today spotted a tweet suggesting same for
> #Tibet. I've been vocal that Twitter itself does not censor hashtags, but
> this gaming of the system could explain the complaints.
>
> My understanding of how TTs work suggests this could be plausible,
> particularly if the spam accounts go unreported and are not identified as
> such. I'd be interested in hearing from Twitter on this.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Feb 2, 2012, at 10:44 AM, Ale Fernandez <skoria at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > Yesterday a lot of people tweeting as Julian Assange was in court found
> their twitter feeds followed by lots of spam bots with identical or
> repeating profiles and avatars. I heard during the beginning of occupy wall
> street that this was used to affect the TT status of hashtags (like
> #occupywallstreet - in the end many the first days used #takewallstreet),
> by making twitter label associated tweets in the "conversation" also as
> porn or spam.
> >
> > Does anyone know more about this, and if it's been confirmed by twitter
> or someone analysing the whole thing - that it would make sense for someone
> to use these bots so as to affect the visibility of problem hashtags - or
> is it just "normal" spam?
> >
> > I know from an IRC bot that was cataloguing the first tweets across
> various OWS hashtags, that there were a few of these spam bots in operation
> those first weeks.
> >
> > Ale
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