The success of twitter spam

Spam has been a problem on twitter ever since it started to get popular. Spammers reason that if you provide an enticing tweet with a link then lots of people are likely to click on it, and once you're on their site you can sell them PPC (porn, pills, casinos) or put spyware on your computer in the way that email spammers do.

Spammers typically use words that are currently in the trending topics - lots of people click on these to see why the topics are trending.

This is a good example from the weekend:


A company has set up multiple accounts, like Chrystal56467, & Sheila76259, all posting the same link. No, I haven't clicked on it.

It's through Bit.ly, so anyone can see the traffic stats -

This link has had nearly 60,000 clicks since June 29th.


Twitter or Bit.ly should do something to stop this!