I’ve been getting spammed by Twitter users and bots from the tweetfollowing.com API script and it’s getting downright annoying. I figured I’d put this out to the Twitter world and see if I can get some help.
How it all started…
On 3:50 PM, Oct 10th, @ArtArmstrong sent me this message: “@SamHowat Are any of them legal to drink publicly at?“, it was a legit question from someone I know.
At 4:17PM Oct 10th, @FreemanBuda sent the first duplicate message of “@SamHowat Are any of them legal to drink publicly at?” and ever since then, I’ve been getting that exact same message from multiple accounts.
I did some looking around initially and found the following:
All of the accounts messaging me have a similar profile information: Location: America, and Web: http://tweetfollowing.com/, with no bio text.
All of the messages come from API not a twitter client or from the website.
If I do a search for “@SamHowat Are any of them legal to drink publicly at?” using Twitter’s search it only returns @ArtArmstrong’s original message, not any of the duplicates. This leads me to believe that Twitter is treating this messages as spam, but then why are they being carried to my account?
Solving the Problem
I contacted TweetFollowing explaining that I am getting spammed with messages from them and I got the following response (PDF).
They don’t seem interested in solving the problem –also seem to have a tenuous grasp of the English language– and I am looking for some help.
Anyone got a script that would let you block any twitter account that references a certain URL?
I don’t really want to block them each as they come in, they’re bots.
Really sick of seeing “companies” like TweetFollowing producing scripts like this for Twitter and I would love to see some type of solution.
Update:
Twitter has started to remove duplicate Tweet’s from it’s system, this helps cut down on spamming like what was effecting me. Also, despite the fact that they deny any involvement or wrong-doing, right after staff from Tweetfollowing.com read this blog post, the spam stopped. Make your own mind up on that one…
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