4 ms·
Ask HN: Twitter spam: what's the purpose?
Recently I've noticed an increase in the number spam tweets that link to my site and I'm not sure what the motivation is.
Are they simply trying to reduce their spam profile by linking to legitimate sites to make them less likely to flagged as spam by Twitter, or could there be something a little darker going on?
An example tweet is from twitter user @MZoASTEFUb:
"@jylan gonna stand there and watch me burn but thats alright...LOL JK, Im gonna stop drop and roll! itstheteenlife http://bl.inc.gs/xSC8B"
The bl.inc.gs link redirects to my site. This was brought to my attention by the target of the tweet @jylan.
Any idea what might be happening here?
- muyyatin 16y agoProbably what you said. Or someone is trying to frame you.
- pmjoyce 16y agoSeems like an inefficient way of framing me - going to one user at a time with an obviously spammy account, so I doubt it's that.
- devmonk 16y agoMy guess is that it is either one of two things: 1. Just link spam-testing or mixing legitimate-looking spam with illegitimate. 2. The plan is to use a delayed URL redirection change technique. For example, in blogs, etc. you can change the link that your profile goes to after the fact, so at first that "Nice post. Thanks!" comment and a link to someone's legitimate blog via the poster's username seems innocuous. Later after you ignore it, they change it to point at their spam site. Hoping you don't notice. They can even change the link that their profile goes to only at certain times of day if they wish and then back later, hoping you won't notice and hoping that Google will pick up their spam link vs. the innocuous-looking fake spam link. By the same token, a URL shortener that could support changing the URL that the shortened URL goes to could be used in exactly the same way. Even if bl.inc.gs seems legit, there may be a backdoor (known or unknown) letting them to change the URL that the shortened URL goes to.
- pmjoyce 16y agoOK, this makes sense to me, thanks. The original link looks innocuous and so is not marked as spam. After a period the URL redirect is changed to point at a spam site but because the bl.inc.gs URL was flagged as OK it's now more likely fly under the radar of Twitter's spam detection algorithm.
- devmonk 16y agoTwitter, Google, and everyone else could do a much better job at handling link spam. They need a mixture of having users flag requests as spam (which many do), analyzing all requests looking for trends in spamming (not just requests from same route/IP, but that would be part of it), looking at users with similar posts/tweets, etc. and then block the spammers. Easy enough, right? ;) Sounds like whoever they outsource to needs to get on the ball though.