Sunday, April 3, 2011

Re: [twitter-dev] Re: need twitter spam for a research project

On Sun, 3 Apr 2011 21:34:54 -0700 (PDT), John Sheehan
<johnsheehan@gmail.com> wrote:
> You can use my account as an example. I'm currently getting between
> 50
> and 150 follow spams per day for the last 3 weeks. Here's a graph
> that
> demonstrates the 'attack' http://screencast.com/t/xl7zcgdYI
>
> If you have any other questions, I'm @johnsheehan and can be reached
> via email same user name at gmail.
>
> John

Interesting - most of the followers I've been getting are real humans,
not that they're all that interesting humans. ;-) There was a period
when I was getting a bunch of followers that were tweeting nonsense,
sometimes not even real sentences. Eventually one or two them started to
tweet links. Apparently the way they work is to build a network - if one
of them follows you and you don't block them, then they copy each other.
I suppose it's possible to collect data via the API and do graph theory
analysis on these accounts to isolate the clusters, but it hardly seems
worth the effort when there are so many accounts just spamming multiple
trending topics apparently with little interference from Twitter.


--
http://twitter.com/znmeb http://borasky-research.net

"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." -- Paul
Erdős

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