After taking so much flack for its frequent outages and the regular attacks on its system, it is only fair that Twitter gets to toot its own horn once in a while.
In a bit of very good news for the company, Twitter says it has finally gotten spam on the site under control.
As Twitter was going through its major growth spurt last year, spammers and scammers flocked to the site. From May through October, as much as 9 per cent of all tweets were spam, according to Twitter’s own numbers. Now that number is down to about 1 per cent, said Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury in a blog post.
“Like it or not, as the system becomes more popular, more and more spammers will try to do their thing,” said Mr Chowdhury. “We’re constantly battling against spam to improve the Twitter experience and we’re happy to report that it’s working.”
Spam is down thanks to the efforts of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, which AdAge recently profiled. But it’s also down thanks to fed-up users, who are reporting spam when they see it on the site.
That’s good news for users, who will be less prone to click on links in malicious tweets. It’s also good news for Twitter.
As ReadWriteWeb points out, since “Twitter’s primary monetisation strategy currently involves selling access to its firehose stream to search providers like Google and Microsoft, it is definitely in the company’s best interest to keep the number of spam messages as low as possible.
