The dangers of spam on social networking sites

I’ve just recently discovered the joys of Twitter, and have found it to be an excellent way to keep people up to date on my latest postings, feature stories, blog entries and industry observations. To my dismay though, I’ve noticed that some people use it for mundane updates: “I’m going to bed now.” “Eating soup, yummm.” “On my way out to party.” On the latter types of entries, I don’t really understand the point, but then again, I’m old. Does anybody really care what I’m having for dinner? Maybe if Emeril Lagasse twitters, people would have an interest in his meals, but for most Twitterers, I suspect nobody really cares. If you really must know, yesterday my wife made tom kha gai. She hasn’t learned to cook American yet, and nobody’s told her about TV dinners. I don’t intend to clue her in. If you want to follow me on Twitter, it’s http://www.twitter.com/Dan_Blacharski.

But beyond the mundane entries, some are now starting to get annoying. Twitter’s remarkable growth and popularity has made it an inevitable spam target. Spam has already penetrated several social networking sites, and Twitter is no exception. According to an entry in Twitter’s blog, the social networking site is starting to fill up with spammy accounts and junk entries promoting the usual array of marginally useful goods and services. Twitter has responded to this trend with a new admin tool that lets their staff find, and subsequently suspend, spam accounts. They’ve also hired a full time “spam marshal” whose only job is to remove spam.

One type of spam I’ve never heard of before is what Twitter calls “follow spam”, which is when someone follows huge numbers of people for the purpose of getting views, and clicks on URLs that are included in posts. Naturally, this causes a bit of confusion, because people are encouraged to follow others, and some high-profile Twitterers (like Barack Obama) have tens of thousands of legitimate followers. One thing Twitter will be looking at in evaluating whether or not someone is guilty of Twitter spam is the number of people you follow, and how many people follow you back.

Naturally, companies must be vigilant about social networking spam. Email-based spam can be controlled with software filters, but what about employees who use Twitter, Facebook, and all the other social networking sites during work hours? It’s certainly possible that someone could click on a spam link and be directed to a malicious web site. Additional policies and protections are definitely in order.