BotKiller to Target Twitter Spam
According to spam-filtration service BotKiller, Twitter spam comprises up to 3.69 percent of all tweets.
They've been working on a solution to cleanse the stream of Twitter spam; their new product tags and blocks computer-generated tweets with a minimal margin of false positives. BotKiller is a product of Rarefied Technologies, an open-source company that implements advanced algorithmic classification for enterprise applications.
According to the BotKiller site, "Petabytes of new information are created daily. This data is meaningless unless we can find what we're looking for. Everyone has had the experience of search results that are polluted with false keywords and unsolicited advertisements. BotKiller can make those go away and make realtime search relevant again."
The company claims that its "specialized lexical parsing" can find and block computer-generated content by analyzing the metadata and the conversations and relationships between post authors and the larger network.
Currently, the service is focusing on spam filtering for real-time UGC, and Twitter provides a case-study playground for the the product's accuracy and effectiveness. Overall, the company cites a 95 percent accuracy rate for spam filtering with a set of false positives equal to less than one percent of all blocked tweets.
Here, we can see a sampling of blocked tweets from a sample of about 3 million tweets:
Clearly, there are still false positives, some of which do appear to be auto-tweets about new blog posts. Rarefied CEO, Gabriel Ortiz, wrote to us in an email this afternoon, "We haven't really made a decision regarding auto-tweeted blog posts, right now we're trying to tag the ones that are from obvious spam blogs, such as those selling prescription drugs or promoting multilevel marketing scams, but we're not yet blocking ALL such blog post tweets, as some of them might be more legitimate."
According to Ortiz, the BotKiller product is currently just a proof-of-concept for their real-time spam classifier. As such, whether the service will be free for end users or how pricing would be tiered is yet to be determined. "We're hoping we can partner with someone who has a desktop or mobile Twitter client to deliver the filtering service to users," he wrote. "It would also make a lot of sense for Twitter themselves to license our solution so they could just mark as private tweets which are likely to be spam, thus keeping them out of the public search and trending topics without stopping people who wish to read messages of that nature from doing so."
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readwriteweb should get a spam filter for their posts
I don't understand the Twitter spam "problem." If you auto-follow anyone who follows you, then yes you'll have a spam problem. But the fix is simple, just don't auto-follow. I'm careful about following users - I check their recent tweets and their listed web page, at a minimum. And if their recent tweets look even slightly spammy or automatically generated, or reek of self-promotion, I don't follow.
There is a little clicky thing called unfollow w/ a block twist. Don't like anyone telling me who I can or cant follow. We play beer games with our spam! HA!
Following the right person is only 1 part of the solution. One of the key advantages of twitter is being able to follow hashtags like #iranelection and spammers target these trending topics. And that's what I hope it can address.
From my understand their are alot of people out their are getting
their twitter accounts unfairly suspended.
I think #
There is a little clicky thing called un-follower w/ a block twist.
You don't have follow anyone !
Reading the article... and visiting the website... this appears to be a test case for their filter.
There are many other uses for, I assume.
Yes You are right, Twitter is only testbed for their solution.
Seems like a good idea in principal - there is clearly a lot of auto following going on and some of the DMs are really just sales messages in (thin) disguise. Not sure if those will be addressed.
In the example above there seem to be a lot of false positives. Ok, we may not all want to read things we might consider inane such as "just got home from shopping" but that depends on how we are using twitter. As mentioned here, you can always unfollow those folks. I am more concerned to eliminate the "I can show you how to get a million followers in 10 minutes" messages that seem to abound these days. If that can be done selectively it would be worth looking into.
In general, reducing the number of overt sales messages on twitter is probably a good thing.
Twitter is like a breath of fresh air on the Social Media scene. I have been on it for just a few weeks now and I have met several interesting people. It is a platform to network with people you would like to meet in real life.
KZ
Email Marketing Program
Just unfollow the spammer that you decided to follow. Duh. Twitter is designed for spam by default. If you are following 100+ others odds are good you are not going to see their updates. How do they get their updates seen? Reposting, aka spamming by Twitter Terms.
Blocking in Twitter works fine for Twitterers sending 90 to 100% Spam.