Twitter Files Suit Against Spam Software Authors

An anonymous reader writes, quoting Network World: "As with any platform that sees a meteoric rise in popularity, it's only a matter of time before spammers throw their hats in the ring and try and exploit the masses for financial gain and other sinister purposes. As the relatively new kid on the block, Twitter is still busying itself trying to tackle and ultimately prevent spammers from destroying the user experience. While Twitter's previous efforts centered exclusively on engineering-based solutions, the company today announced that they are also pursuing legal avenues to fend off spammers." From the Twitter blog: "With this suit, we’re going straight to the source. By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter."

Comments

Multiple Posts

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of this could be solved if they just blocked the same message being tweeted more than two or three times at more than one person. More than one time I have opened up a profile to see that their last 100+ tweets were all the same message just tweeted at 100+ different people.

Re:Multiple Posts

[allo]

- one person tweeting links without text all the time
- one person tweeting urls with always the same domain

Re:Multiple Posts

[Karl Cocknozzle]

Mod this up! Identical messages to hundreds (or thousands) of people in a few seconds are SPAM, and almost certainly violate the TOS. Seems like the technical challenge to blocking that sort of spam would be quite low.

Granted, it is hard to tell just what is "spam" on Twitter since, to those of us who aren't regular users of the site, almost all of it looks like unredeemable garbage. But I assume regular tweeters know the difference between what they "want to see" and what they don't.

Re:Multiple Posts

[Anonymous Coward]

Going after the spammers, yes. Going after the toolmakers? I dunno... They're not breaking Twitters TOS, unlike the ones actually using the tools.
(Of course, if they create and use the tools, I say hit them hard)

Re:Multiple Posts

[History's Coming To]

It's the same as the rest of the internet really. Quick explanation for those who don't use it:

You don't see "all the tweets" - that's impossible, both in terms of computers and eyeball 1.0. You pick ("follow") the people you want to hear from, and if anybody puts your name in a tweet you see that too, regardless of whether you follow them. You also see tweets that people you follow have "retweeted".

Therefore, the only real route from the spammer to you is one of the following:

• You follow the spammer. (Why?!)
• Someone you follow retweets the spammer (so you unfollow them if they persist)
• The spammer has included your name in a tweet.

This last one is how it normally works - Twitter have, by design, included a good and easy to use API. It's led to a lot of innovative things, and makes integration very easy. It also makes automating "@PersonX" spam very easy.

It's also very easy to click "report spam", which blocks the account immediately and may well lead to it being deleted. To be honest, the signal/spam ratio on Twitter is fairly low in my experience, and spam can be spotted in the same way as normal - links without much content, an attractive lady in the picture, and a name like "iLovePorn28483".

Re:Multiple Posts

[History's Coming To]

OK, just tried it (a mention of an iPad in an otherwise normal tweet):

10s - Nothing
1min - Nothing
2min - Nothing
5min - Nothing

It could be that I'm quite active in blocking spam, and Twitter has an algorithm that's picked up on that and is filtering. I'm sure I'll get one or two eventually. I wouldn't like to see bots blocked entirely, I've actively enjoyed one which picks up on the word "Cripes" (a Dangermouse quoter for the UK cognoscenti).

Re:Multiple Posts

[Karl Cocknozzle]

Filters are only as unintelligent as the people who program them.

For spam on twitter to get results, it would seem to require meeting a couple criteria:

1) Unless the person you want to spam is following you, it has to be directed @somebody so it will show up in their mentions, or the target of the tweet will never actually see it.
2) An actionable link for the user to click-on once they see the tweet.

So, there are literally billions of messages sent on Twitter every day. An enormous percentage of them do not include an "@", which means you can almost certainly discount that tweet as spam. So the "sameness" thing really comes down to the URL... So how hard would it be to write a rule that says:

"If person XYZ posts more than XYZ tweets @somebody in XYZ period of time and all of the tweets lead to the exact-same (or less than 10% different) URL, its likely spam."

Answer: It wouldn't be that hard at all. And is 100% necessary, as the decade-plus-long failure of various "sue spammers" campaigns can attest to.

Yes, by all means sue the bastards. But don't expect the judge to solve the whole problem in perpetuity throughout the universe--instead use the judge to extract a penalty from the spammers after the fact.

In other words, it isn't "either/or" but "both" that you require for an effective solution.

Re:Multiple Posts

[b4dc0d3r]

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest Twitter addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate Twitter uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of Twitter will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many Twitter users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for Twitter
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all Twitter addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in Twitter
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than Twitter to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by Twitter
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) Twitter headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending Twitter should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time Twitter addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my Twitter
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Re:Multiple Posts

[Karl Cocknozzle]

If person XYZ posts

Hundreds, thousands of accounts, using proxies/botnet.

(or less than 10% different) URL

short URLs

Filters are only as unintelligent as the people who program them.

yes, that's it!

...Except that Twitter can see all of the posts simultaneously, even though you can't, so posting from multiple accounts isn't an automatically effective dodge.

You could also make the threshold 3-5% or any arbitrary number...

I notice you have no response to the real thrust of my post, which is, neither solution by itself solves anything.

Re:Multiple Posts

[Cajun Hell]

but we haven't even solved the problem of email spam

That's a much harder problem. There are all kinds of things a centralized service like Twitter could have done, which can't be (realistically) applied to email.

Go get 'em

[OldGunner]

I'm not much of a Twitter user, but even an old fart such as myself can see that spammers destroy everything in their path. Good luck to Twitter and thanks for having a big enough pair to go after these Twits.

Re:Go get 'em

[LifesABeach]

Spammers make money marketing products of others. Why is it that those who stand to gain are not also brought to a nuetral third party for judgement?