Got in a debate yesterday with someone reference reporting spam on Twitter. She doesn’t, I do. Twitter themselves want to fight spam and have hired more for that team recently – and one of the things they’ll no doubt be doing is building smarter algorithms to challenge spam accounts faster.
One of the main learning points for those algorithms will be the accounts that people have manually reported for spam in the past, so by playing an active part, I’d hope I help improve both my personal experience of Twitter – and the quality of the platform as a whole.
For my part, I tend to report the following types of account for spam:
- Those who Follow/Unfollow instantly, just in the hope of bringing themselves to my attention.
- Anything that spams a whole bunch of individuals (usually iphone giveaways in my case. No idea why).
- Those that tweet nothing but promotional sales material AND @mention me without good cause
- Any application account that causes my own account to tweet without my express permission.
The last is probably the one that annoys me the most, but I guess it’s actually slightly off topic for this post. Returning to the point, my friend (she’ll identify herself in the comments if she wants!) says no – she feels everyone and every business should feel free to use Twitter as they wish. I’ll accept that, provided those actions don’t deliberately downgrade my experience of the platform.
What I’d like to do now is update this post with my thoughts – but before I do, I’m going to throw it out there…. I being unreasonable?
Musings from Sussex 