Twitter Trending Topics Rendered Useless by Spammers

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”.

Nuff said?

Related posts:

1. Spam Tops Trending Topics
2. Brazen Spammers Openly Marketing Twitter Spamming Software