In an attempt to show off its efforts at reducing spam across the micro-blogging platform, Twitter just unveiled new stats that show it’s been doing a pretty good job at this.
A little over a year ago, about 6% of tweets were spam. That number gradually rose as Twitter continued to gain interest all the way up until August 2009 when it reached a peak of almost 11% of tweets being spam.
I’m sure you’ve all experienced a tweet which could be categorized as spam, like the occasional follower who wants you to check out their erotic Website or other useless service. Twitter defines spam as a variety of different behaviors that range from, “insidious to annoying.” On its blog, the company went into detail,
“Posting harmful links to phishing or malware sites, repeatedly posting duplicate tweets, and aggressively following and un-following accounts to attract attention are just a few examples of spam on Twitter.”
Twitter said this is obviously an ongoing battle and it will continue to work on reducing spam across its platform. As of February 2010, Twitter has brought spam down to about 1% of tweets. It’s still a lot given that Twitter is seeing 50 million Tweets per day, which equals 600 tweets per second. So don’t be surprised if you encounter some occasional spam, but it’s definitely a sign Twitter has been working hard at reducing this.
The startup said, if you want to get involved in reducing Twitter spam, just click the “report for spam” button on any suspicious profile page.
The company assured its users, “like it or not, as the system becomes more popular, more and more spammers will try to do their thing. We’re constantly battling against spam to improve the Twitter experience and we’re happy to report that it’s working.”
