Anatomy of a Twitter Porn Spammer

Anatomy of a Twitter Porn Spammer

If you're anything like me, you hate Twitter spammers. This kind of thing is especially troubling when you think you have a new follower and soon discover that it is not a real person following you, but a pornbot that wants to sucker you into clicking a link. Fortuntely, it is very easy to spot porn spam if you know what to look for.
To help you sniff out porn spammers, I've produced this graphic.


Brief rundown:
1) No profile pic: whoever or whatever created this account did not take the time to add a profile pic. If it was a human, then it was due to haste; they have a lot more of these fake accounts to start, so finding and adding pictures is not at the top of the priority list. If it's a bot, then it's not programmed to add one. Alternatively, you might see a profile pic of a sexy young girl. No, you didn't suddenly become a Twitter stud, in case you were wondering.

2)Uncreative username: while many real users also have fairly nondescript usernames, the presence of underscores and numeric digits is a dead giveaway. So far, our friend Randolph_780 is looing more like a program than a human.

3) Following hundreds, followed by none: This is the whole reason they make these  accounts. They follow people so that those people will be curious about their new follower, and hopefully bait them into clicking a link. As you can see, only 8 people followed back.

4) One tweet: A person, even one who creates and promptly abandons his/her Twitter account, will always tweet at least a handful of times. The bot that created this account only needed to tweet once in order to publicize that link.

5) Stolen text, diguised link: Now we know this is a bot. The text is completely out of context and is truncated... Obviously, the program that created this account fished the text from some other source and stuck it in. This seems to be about motorcycles. URL shortening services (this one used ow.ly) are not uncommon, but most of the time, it's going to be bit.ly, as that is the one Twitter and many 3rd party applications use by default.

 The important thing for everyone to realize is that reporting this as spam and blocking the user do virtually nothing. The account is red-flagged, but the human or bot making these accounts remains active. What you have to do is resist the urge to click the link. Seriously. You know it's porn based on these signs. If you like porn, that's great, go ahead and find some on your own. If you click this link, the site you click into will continue paying the Twitter porn spammer to drive traffic to their site, and the pollution on Twitter will continue.

These are probably not earth-shattering revelations, but I hadn't seen anyone outline this stuff yet, and to new Twitter users, this might be news, and I'm just doing my part to cut some static out of Twitter. Now, if I could figure out a way to filter all of the Foursquare postings...