Had some interesting discussions here and on Twitter back in April about the spam situation on Twitter, including some spirited assertions from some quarters that spam was impossible on Twitter. The arguments for this point of view, based on semantic technicalities, are several. First, your updates are public, so by merely following you, someone is not spamming you. Second, you can turn off Twitter notification emails, so these are not spam either.

I disagreed with this at the time, and still do, and so apparently does Twitter. The company published a post Monday about its recognition of a spam problem and its commitment to deal with it:

“We are actively engaged in working to defeat the variety of spam that has made its way to Twitter. The main motivation for spammy behavior on Twitter seems to be the usual: driving web traffic to another site. Some account owners will serially create many accounts and then post thousands of links. Others have only one account but still go crazy posting links—usually to the same web site and often in a way that attempts to trick people into clicking.

Posting links to Twitter is great and we encourage people to do so. However, spammers are posting links on a whole different scale and they’re doing something else we call Aggressive Following. This behavior entails following thousands of other accounts in the hope of reciprocation and it really peeves Twitter users because many of us are sensitive to our Follower count—we don’t want email notifications triggered by spammers.”

Last night, which I’ve dubbed The Night of 1 Million Lost Followers, (it’s probably more across all users), Twitter did extensive cleanup on its database in order they say to “remove spammers from the system (which we’ve been doing a lot lately).” As a result, most users are reporting decreased numbers of followers and people they are following.

Tags: twitter, spam, followers, following, clean-up