If my experience is any indication, Twitter has seen an uptick in spam lately. The Twitter spam that I see most frequently are keyword spam. The keyword that I’ve seen generate the most spam lately is “iPad”, although that’s obviously indicative of what I and my friends talk about.
I got a lot of iPad-spambot activity earlier this week. At first, I was annoyed, since the pattern was easy to detect. But then I noticed another pattern about the accounts themselves: of the 28 spam replies that I received, all but one of them had female names.
This is in stark contrast to the email spam sitting in my junk folder. Looking at the first 50, only two have female names. The rest are a mix of male names and company or product names (“Online Doctorate”, “Peak Performance”, etc).
Why do Twitter spambots apparently overwhelmingly choose female names?
because men are stupid.
While I don’t disagree with this assessment, men are only about half of the people online.
I recall that it was similar back in the days of Myspace, the spam accounts all seemed to have female names and ‘pretty’ looking profile pictures.
I don’t have statistics but I wonder what percentage of Twitter users fall into the young and male demographic.
I’ve also noticed the accounts sending spam have started to become private, locked profiles too.
On the other hand, are the Twitter accounts legit but compromised and if so does that talk to the ease of socially engineering ways into twitter accounts?
Perhaps simple ‘I forgot my password’ verification questions that can be answered by a users open Facebook profile… (mothers maiden name or whatnot).
Or Firesheep?
//ian
When I’ve noticed an uptick in twitter spam, it’s usually been quite obvious that they’re spammers and not simply someone whose account has been hacked. For example, on the last batch of iPad spam, the usernames were all of the form [female name][surname][four-digit number]. Even if there is a large number of hacked accounts, I wouldn’t expect there to be such a bias towards women’s accounts being compromised.
The Atlantic published an infographic (which I don’t think was entirely well-done, but I’ll leave that question aside) that shows the number of users for Twitter and the number of users of Facebook:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/facebook-vs-twitter-comparing-social-demographics/68283/
Comstock says that the majority of Twitter users are 35 and older (a demographic which, sadly, now includes me), and that younger users are 12% less likely to tweet:
http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/younger-us-demos-12-less-likely-to-tweet-8679/comscore-twitter-age-distribution-users-april-2009png/
So with those in mind, I think that the Old Spice Guy should be the one telling me how I can get a free iPad, because I might actually click on his
abslinks.I always assumed it’s because guys are incredibly sad, and if we see a female tweeting at us, we may follow them or click on their links without thinking much about the content. Women are less likely to do this because they’re often less pathetic.