Averting Twitter Spam

Posted by Gabe on November 28, 2009 under Twitter, Twitter for Beginners | 5 Comments to Read

The most annoying and frustrating spam that has been running rampant through Twitter lately is the dreaded Britney tweets that end up in your mentions folder.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, consider yourself lucky as the avatar is extremely pornographic in nature.  There are hundreds of bots that cycle through Twitter handles, spewing their brand of filth virtually on your front porch with no request for it nor a warning thereof.  My method for combatting this to date has been to click on the sender, click the “Report for Spam”, exit Tweetdeck and reload so the avatar is gone from my screen.  These spam bots have been so prevalent lately that I find myself doing this several times during the day.

I came up with the concept that it would be nice if you kept a list of words and/or phrases in your personal profile, that if found in the mentions, you would never see them.  This I believe is a sound idea that I would like Twitter and other apps like Tweetdeck to adopt.  Then I noticed something.  In the current version of Tweetdeck there is a Filter option at the bottom of every column, including the ‘Mentions’ column.  If you click this you can add words to the box. Usually this means that you want to see only tweets that include these words. However, if you change the option just to the left of the input box from a ‘+’ sign to a ‘-’ sign, you will only see tweets that DO NOT include these words.  So I added the word ‘britney’, changed it to a ‘-’ sign and voila!  Tweets with that word in it will not be seen in my Mentions folder in Tweetdeck!! Now they will still appear in my Twitter mentions but I rarely use that interface to read my tweets.  It is certainly a poor man’s solution, but until they fix this problem I’m going with it. Please let me know if this post helps you, or what else we can do to combat these spammers.