The next spam wave will come from Twitter real time search
I think Twitter is about to have a really bad spam problem and I am not talking about spam from the people you are following. This spam is manageable since you can always unfollow anyone.
No, real time Twitter search and tinyurls are a winning combination to flood the stream with spam.
I believe that the real time search phenomenon is one of the hottest concept in social medias now. Thanks to clients like TweetDeck, you can hook yourself to a search stream using keywords or hashtags and get a real time feed of everything happening in Twitter about these keywords. For example, when I saw the information about the acquisition of Sun by Oracle, I immediately started a real time search on “mysql” to get the beat on the implications of this acquisition on MySQL. Sure enough, in one tweet I found interesting, I clicked on the tinyurl and got to a spammer site. Ouch. That was too easy.
Any spammer can now leverage any hot trends in Twitter by sending tweets about this trend and include their spam url hidden behind a tinyurl. If the tweet is well worded, you can’t even rely on the url to get an idea of its validity.
I think this is just a matter of time before real time searches are flooded with spam.
What are the solutions?
First, tinyurl services should probably start checking for potential spammers urls and not transform them.
Second, at some point I think Twitter wont have the choice to run spam detection on inbound messages. Since the inbound messages throughput is quite large and increasing as Twitter is gaining popularity, it might be too costly to run spam detection on all messages. To avoid checking all messages maybe they could establish some sort of trustiness or karma indicator on users. Depending on the users behaviors or maybe by looking at their social graphs, Twitter could rate users and use that to decide to apply spam detection or not on inbound messages form these users.
What do you think?
Tags: search, socialmedias, spam, twitter
I’ve read this somewhere at one point in the begining of the url shortening wave, but cant remember the source…
It was about how url shortening services should (as in must) have an API endpoint to give the expanded version of the link and how twitter/rt search clients should (as in must) use that functionality when displaying received notices.
I dont know about the “karma” idea but it seems a good starting point for a community brainstorm on this.
Your post makes a lot of sense. We will have this problem for as long as decision on relevance is made on the client (based on keywords or hashtags) as opposed to on the server (based on some deeper AI). My post on the subject – http://somic.org/2009/03/18/the-ultimate-twitter/.
I agree with Quikredfox.
Twitter clients must run reverse-shortening api calls to show what we’re about to click on. But, if they auto-expand them, shortening services with stats will lose some features. An hover link could work.
However, it’s always hard to fight against spammers. For example, what if the shortened link is another shortened link? Should the client block the link or continue to auto-expand the link infinitely? In any case, spammers could find other ways to obfuscate their links. No easy solution.
url shortening is one issue but not the only issue. I thinks that if url shortning services would do a first pass of spam detection (and having a tinyurl that encodes another tinyurl is easy to deal with) they could provide a certain trust level that their tinyurls are not pointing to spam. For example, if bit.ly would run some url spam filtering, then we could “trust” bit.ly urls not to provide spam and more easily follow them.
On the other hand, I really think Twitter won’t have a choice and come up with spam detection in their tweet stream because they can’t rely on tinyurl services and nothing prevents inserting any url in a tweet. A url can very well not be shortened, not be too funky and still be a spam link.
good post Colin and fully agree. I have noticed, at least on bit.ly is the following message on a few links that I have clicked on,
“”Warning – this site has been flagged by SURBL and may contain unsolicited content.
The content of this web page appears to contain spam, or links to unsolicited or undesired sites.”"
This is definitely a start, however, I do think that if Twitter really wants to gain mainstream, it will have to do some self-checking prior to adding links to tweets or restrict only to URL shortening services that screen links.