Structured Thought . ORG

I have seen this question come up quite a bit in Twitter discussions, so I thought I’d detail what’s happening, and why spammers have decided to attempt to use Twitter to forward their mission.

Background:

Anyone who knows me knows my opinion on spammers, scammers, and other generally nefarious characters. I find it the lowest of the low to make one’s living at the expense of the innocence, trust, or ignorance of others. I have gone on record saying that the world would be a better place without these individuals, and I’m really not opposed to any methods that might bring about their removal from the planet.

Anyway, spammers will attach themselves to any form of media that they believe MIGHT give them the slightest edge, and possibly bring them a couple of bucks. What spammers don’t realize (partly because they’re just plain greedy, and partly because they’re just dumb), is that abusing the systems that they latch on to (much like lampreys onto sharks), will only stay afloat as long as the system is usable (just like any other parasite). Too much abuse of the system makes it unusable, and therefore unfit for spamming. Because of this, any time a new service, even one that people think might be un-spammable, like Twitter, spammers flock to new services in droves, all looking for that one click that might increase the CPM for their ‘customer’.

How the Spammers are Using Twitter:

As I said above, spammers are not abusing Twitter because they make money off of it. Why or how, then, you ask, do spammers use Twitter? Well, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?

Indexing is the Key:

The largest search engine on the Internet is Google. Google uses webcrawling robots both to build its database, and help with developing rankings for pages. The best way to have your page increase its page rank is to get it linked from a lot of different places. Each time the Google crawler comes across a link to your page, one part of your page rank increases. As the page rank goes up, the higher your page shows up in search results of topics related to your content.

Spammers Abuse Indexing, Not Twitter:

So, Google’s webcrawler comes across someone’s Twitter page. I’ll link mine, for an example. When it arrives on the page, it takes a catalog of every link it sees. Next, it follows each of those links to see where they go, adding to the database every step of the way. Here’s the key: Every person’s Twitter page has a link to their list of followers. When the crawler hits that link, it sees a list of every person following that user, even those that the user doesn’t follow back. The crawler then goes and hits each of those Twitter pages, following every link, and indexing everything on those pages as well.

This is the key. If a spammer is following 12,000 people, Google’s crawler will eventually hit their Twitter page 12,000 times, artificially inflating that Twitter page’s popularity. Consequently, the spam pages that the Twitter page links to also has its popularity artificially inflated, temporarily raising that page’s position in search results. Since a spammer’s ultimate goal is to have its ‘clients’ pages show up in the organic search results, these artificial bursts of popularity are a quick and easy way to make a buck.

I hope this has helped shed some light on the seemingly useless abuse of Twitter by spammers. It’s not just people that post undesirable content, it’s people abusing a useful tool at the expense of legitimate users. The very small idealistic side of me believes that some day, the Internet will be a good place again, where people can share ideas freely, without the threat of useless wastes of flesh that try to make a few bucks at the expense of others.