Twitter : spam in strong decline

According to figures released by Twitter, spam represents less then 1% of all messages published daily.

By releasing such statistics, it appears that Twitter is claiming victory against spam, even if in this fight it is generally easy to win a battle rather then the war. Twitter nevertheless attributes this to their actions undertaken to rid their microblogging platform of spam messages.

"We will continue to fight to improve the Twitter experience and we are pleased to announce that this is working", indicated Twitter on their official blog.

According to Twitter, besides a few periodic spikes in activity, the overall tendency points to a reduction in spam. On the graph release by Twitter (below) which covers the period from February 2009 to February 2010, the daily number of spam messages has shrunk since the summer of 2009 to today represent less then 1%. At the beginning of August 2009, close to 11% of messages put online daily were spam.

On Twitter, 50 million tweets are posted every day. The platform invites all users to participate in this fight against spam by reporting suspect messages. Accessible directly from the Twitter profile page, a user is able to signal a suspect profile through the "mark as spam" link, or by sending a tweet to @spam. Depending on user feedback, an account may be blocked.

The spam can also be a phishing or scam connotation (the diffusion of malicious links), with Twitter announcing at the beginning of the month that they were implementing a new protection service for private messages. All submitted links are rerouted to this service for initial analysis, calling on the twt.tl URL shortcut.