How would you prefer to report Twitter spam?

The above comment assumes that enough clicks on the "report spam" link will automatically suspend the account. Unfortunately this is one of those places where human interaction is still the best possible filter.

How about a "report spam" link, which then submits the job to a queue of Human Interaction Tasks on Amazon's Mechanical Turk? This will place the spammers under human scrutiny.

Or how about a queue where Twitterers can go and check all the possibly-spam accounts, and give their vote on whether they think it's spam or not? This will keep it in the community, and people will feel that they have a hand in improving the service that we all use.

You could even hook up a Bayesian engine to the vote queue and let it learn from the humans :-)

As discussed in the previous thread, one person's spam isn't another. I would actually offer 2 different options to users that block people: Mark as 'spam', or something like 'I don't care for this person's content'. That way you don't get people who just don't want to be followed by someone reposting lumping their complaints under spam. This would allow you to weight a spam score that, when triggered, could shut down an account for a review.

A block link should be included directly in the email notifying you about a new follower (maybe call it 'review this follower', so you're not implying you need to make up your mind about blocking a user from the notification email along). It would then lead to a page with the 2 options above. The page to block a user should include that user's last 5-10 tweets, so someone can get a feel for the kind of updates they do, including their homepage URL.

Lastly, if you're going to act in any way on spam users by removing their access or accounts, there should be a clear posting (not hidden in the TOS) that explains what spam is to people.

I'd like to see this is a few places. As others have mentioned, it should be on the profile page, probably next to the 'block' button.

I'd also like to see it on the New Follower email
(see http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/to...)

and I'd also like to see it on the Followers page, next to the 'follow' and 'block' buttons (for people that I'm not following yet but are following me)

I agree with Joost's comments related to the nature of the spam. Personally, I am most offended by the New Follower spam but I know that others are offended by too many links back to a web site / blog and automated updates for things like announcing that they are live on Qik, come chat! So at the risk of making this overly complicated, we should have some kind of drop-down box and/or text box that allows us to describe the nature of the spam.

There's a new form of spam. @mytweets is exploiting the most used hashtags, like #proxxima, #nob , etc , to spam people who track those strings.

I guess it should be safe to block anyone who posts the same link N times in a row...

Hi Crystal, [who is the duct tape of Twitter],

I think a 'report' link like we see on some forums would work, Except, I wouldn't punish people instantly. Some are pure spammers. But many misunderstand too. I once had a friend/folllower ask me for a link. And a stranger I never asked to follow me yelled 'hey that's spam'. Huh?

Thanks for all your terrific help since the beta!!

PS- Any update on http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/to...

*oops, sorry link shouldabeen-> http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/to...

what about we tweet @reportspam @spammerID. then you have a number of reports, times , so on. (@reportspam is you, and @spammerID is them, the bad spammers)

why am i a cupcake?

I think there needs to be a report spam button on the profile page.

It needs an inline command (ala @/d) so I can do it at any time, whether on the road or on the laptop.

You need fast reaction, so that spamming is never worth while, even if bot automated. That means automatic reaction, but you want to avoid human reporting errors.

So add a "spammer @foobar" command. It flags the account and reduces # of posts account can make per minute. On the fly guessing here. Have each report reduce outbound by 20% of total. So 5 reports makes it hit zero. At some level (which you can decide internally) you get notified to check it out. Otherwise a given spam report will wear off after, say, 24 hours. Accounts that hit zero might require manual re-enable, up to you.

Oh yes, and you can only use the "spammer" command on someone who has recently sent you a message.

Open question on how to notify sender. They ought to be told, but should they be told who did it? I guess not explicitly, but keeping them from figuring it out by timing is too hard. So just send them a system DM alerting them that they've been rate limited by a user who thought they were spammer. If they aren't, no problem, they'll be back to normal in a day. If they are, take a hike.

Other considerations.

You could require a CAPTCHA in addition to (but I wouldn't do instead of) the 24 hour period.

Do you allow people to flag as spammers only @reply messages, or also messages from people they follow? After all, they can always unfollow. You might want to have a different mechanism in the follow case (e.g. an option on the unfollow form and/or command to give spam as the reason).

You need to consider both sides of the equation. Always consider what the next spammer escalation might be. In this case, my immediate thought is that they might try to overwhelm the system with false spam complaints. E.g. set up an account, and then report a bunch of people they follow as spammers. (Particularly ones who are reporting on their other bots.)

This isn't as much of a problem for the @reply case. But it's a problem for the general case of my following back someone, only to discover he's a spammer.

Short term, you could decrease impact for people who reporting multiple spammers in short period of time, but that's not great. Or you could only count reports from such a person if others do the same. But it all gets messy. Down the road I think the right solution to that is to assign a reputation to a person based on age of account, connectivity and activity, and then assign more weight to reports from accounts with good reputation, and have less tolerance of spam reports on accounts with low reputations.

Two things to always keep in mind.

This isn't a technical problem, it's a social problem. In particular, it's a war against an intelligent enemy. Don't treat it like static that you are trying to remove from a phone line.

There is no winning this battle. It's about tradeoffs between ease-of-use and security. And it's about strategy and anticipating what the next move will be when you close a door. All you can do is try and make the cost of spamming sufficiently higher than the cost of defending from spam.

I'd be happy to talk about this more directly. I've spent a lot of time on the email anti-spam side of things. The technologies are slightly different, but the overall tradeoffs and strategies are not.

@nazgul

+1 for Kee Hinckley's suggestion of an inline command. (As an aside, I think I prefer the keyword 'reportspam' to 'spammer' since the former seems more like a verb -- makes it more similar to track, follow, leave.)

+1 also for the idea of adding more weight to spam reports from accounts that have a higher (internal, Twitter-derived) reputation score.

As to notifying the spammer... it might be best to do it several ways:

1. have something displayed on their home page that reads: "A total of x people have reported your account as a possible spammer, y of them in the last 24 hours. Your account may be suspended if z more people report you."

2. Every time they login to IM, send them a message similar to the above.

3. Send them the same message as a direct message

4. Send them the same message via the email address they used to register

Since most of the true spammers are probably using bots and don't bother to login to their accounts via the web, it's possible that #4 will be the most effective (unless they use throw-away email addresses).

Following on wendelscardua's point, I'd love it if Track alerts can be enhanced to recognize that we've blocked someone and therefore don't want to receive their tweets, even if they use one of the words we're tracking.

P.S. I just noticed that since this is a discussion, I couldn't star (or otherwise mark as noteworthy) anyone's reply.

Related thread: Nasty techniques used by Twitter spammers

I have to +1 for Kee Hinckley's inline suggestion too.

+1 +1 +1 for the karma/reputation idea. If we are ever going to have an online society/economy, we need to start building up personal credibility in a real way. People are on the internet for the long haul now. I, for one, would like to see a reputation return on all the years I've spent on the internet helping people on various forums and IRC channels.

Oh, and if any GetSatisfaction.com moderators are listening: when are you going to support OpenID logins?

For that matter, Crystal, when is Twitter planning to support OpenID? Perhaps to associate one's existing OpenID with a Twitter account, for added credibility?

I would like it if there were a mobile command that I could send back like:
spam @annoyingFer which would automatically flag them as spammers (which should tally, so that if say 5 people flag them their account is automatically blocked), and this setting should also automatically block them from sending me any more messages.

I would also like one that is
stalker @creepydude for people who are doing creepy stuff that freaks us out.

And maybe one for:
addwhore @letsaddeveryone for people that just ruthlessly add people that they don't know. I don't want to have to make my profile PRIVATE but I had to because I kept getting people I have never met, nor ever heard of, adding me, and then never answering my direct messages asking them who they are!

This way you can have different recourse for different types of bad behaviour.

Thanks for listening -i

I think ev is looking into the [@]mytweets spammer.

addwhore spammers- adding me, maybe I will follow them and their randomness... the "spammer is now following you on twitter" emails bug me the most. I don't follow spammers.

Right now we can:
FOLLOW
TRACK
HELP
TRIPS
Maybe we can
SPAMBLOCK

as in send an update that says SPAMBLOCK <username> and they're blocked and tagged as a spammer for the admins.</username>

In last week or so I've seen a pretty dramatic increase in the number of "spam" accounts trying to follow me. I've blocked most of them, but would like an easy way to report suspected spammers.

And while on one hand its nice that you're checking to make sure I really really want to block someone it makes the process a little cumbersome...and then after blocking it takes me back home instead of my "followers" list.

I'm pruning my list now so have multiple accounts following me that I didn't even know were there.

A the same time, I'd hate to see a legitimate outside service blocked by a minority of people.

Ditto what mdy said.

Flag as spam.

I repeat- TRIPS??? what is this? I can't find ref to this on the nets