Twitter Trending Topics Rendered Useless by Spammers

12 Jul 2009

Twitter’s Trending Topics seems like a good idea in theory but turns out to be a bad idea in practice because the system is too easily gamed by spammers. If you’re a spammer that wants to get your link in front of a lot of eyes you simply check out the top Trending Topics and add them to your tweets. If you have enough fake Twitter accounts and use a service or bot that posts from all of them at once, you can fill a page with your links, as you can see from the screen shot below.

This is a screen shot of the #2 Trending Topic on Twitter (#Chrisisadouche) at 8:30 am Sunday, July 9, 2009. The #1 Trending Topic is currently #Ihavetoadmit which is just as riddled with spam for a video sharing site and tweets that read, “#ihavetoadmit | Download and Watch Bruno Online. http://linkremoved”.

chrisisadouche

Nuff said?

http://www.freetwitterforum.com Gary

Yes, this is very true. It is so sad that no matter what is created in this world. Even something as simple as twitter, that we are always going to have to worry about scammers trying to cheat the system.
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