Twitter Spam: Twits, Twerps and Twats

It is finally here. Twitter spam. (It has probably been around for a while but now it is here for me personally.)  Now that Twitter is a mainstream form of communication it has been hijacked by scammers, spammers and other idiot marketers.

Over the past few days my followers have been mainly from  make money fast and other fake accounts that are trying to get my attention.

As always, the spam works on the ability to send large numbers of messages for little or no cost. It relies on the few people who click it and make it worthwhile.

Spammers also target the hot topic trends  in their messages to try and get the most page views.

What can you do? If the problem continues, it is going to be very inconvenient to have to block all the fake accounts. At the moment, users can send reports of abuse by following @spam and direct messaging a copy of the message when it occurs. As the problem develops, I am sure that tweeting platforms will develop faster ways of preventing these messages from reaching you.

Clean Tweets – is a Firefox extension that works quite well at sifting the Twitter search results and will remove trending spam.

• It bans messages from  accounts that are younger than 24 hours.
• Blocks accounts that mentions three or more trending topics.
• Allows you to quickly block spam accounts from the search results.