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Bram Selleslach | (Online) Sales | Internet Marketing

I’m not saying that people should be silenced, or kept from saying what they want to say.
The problem is that Automated Tweets or Spams, for example the tweet “What Colour M&M are you Quiz” is not what people want to say, it is an advertising message created by websites like lolquiz to drive traffic. The M&M quiz became the most tweeted message of the day, joined by three other quiz automated messages. This makes it quite difficult for people to unfollow others when they are following thousands.
I don’t believe that this is the purpose of Twitter, nor a matter of what people saying what they want to say.

Another big reason to stop the Twitter Litter is that auto tweets are risking the servers to crash due to overload.

That is the Twitter principle – for me anyway.

Cheers
Volker

But if we need to flag people because of automated tweets, doesn’t that have an impact on your freedom of speech idea? You flag someone because they are doing something inappropriate, in this case spamming. Instead of flagging each and everyone who happened to press that link and sent the automated tweet, isn’t it better if we work together with Twitter to stop these?
What we are trying to do is bring Twitter back to what it was meant for: a platform for people to update their ‘status’, share views and share interesting online content. Not a marketplace for companies to get brief and broad brand penetration, whilst pissing people off.
Looking at Facebook, the sharing of Quiz results has dropped significantly, because it is unwanted content. I believe it is the same with Twitter, just that it is still too easy for companies to spam the channel.
As you say, people who spam will not have long life expectancy on Twitter as people will unfollow, but I think that Twitter should step in and work against automated tweets, as its not what its there for in the first place.

From my viewpoint, you are suggesting many ways to work around the spamming, while still actually letting it to continue. Isn’t it better to just try and make it stop? The problem isn’t massive yet, but I believe it should be taken care of before it becomes a real nuisance.

Chris

Thanks for the comment and the note, and the reply of course. Might want to add an automatic reminder when you post a comment

I agree with automated tweets being bad for Twitter and the community, but I started unfollowing people doing that, and assume so do most people. They don’t block up my tweet list and will continue to be less effective if more and more people actcually start blocking those spammers.

It is an easy way to do, isn’t it? Just block them. I don’t actually remember if Twitter allows to flag people spamming?

It should happen and Twitter should have an option to flag people: just the other day someone sent me an @ reply trying to sell me something. A few “blocks” and that person should be removed by Twitter, shouldn’t she?

Automated Tweets: I agree, anyone using social media should not delay tweets or send automated tweets. But, it is entirely up to them because they become impersonal, the opposite of what social media is about. Hence they loose out in the long run, less followers etc. If you autofollow people who follow you, then you are in the sh* and shoud stop that

Your second point, again, if you use a twitter tool, e.g. Tweetdeck, you have your favourites and your friends in columns. All the spam just dissappears automatically. I don’t believe that Spammers will take over as the community on twitter will react, as described above, on blocking them etc.

Unfollow is only 1 click away – so honestly I don’t see the problem. Maybe I don’t see the problem as yet.

Do you follow me on Twitter yet? @ballueder

Automated tweets, or spam, actually do two things that impairs our freedom of speech:

1. As they are automated, we have no control over their spread. Twitter Litter is not when you are consciously spamming, but when a company does it for you. As most of the times you can’t really see the result from your, for example, quiz without sending a spam to all your followers. That can hardly be seen as freedom of speech, can it?

2. As twitter gets flooded with automatically generated tweets, it becomes harder to spot the user generated tweets that you actually want to read. Hence, it becomes more difficult to get your voice or message across.

We are in an early stage of companies littering twitter, but imagine when this moves past the marketing innovators and is adopted by the greater mass. You will have to start to unfollow a lot of people as the automated tweets will flood your screen.

I also believe in freedom of speech, but if someone is screaming and making a ruckus in a public area, I promise you that he will be silenced quite soon.

Should not everyone be allowed to mention what they want? Is Twitter not a tool to shout out what you think and if people think that what you shout out is great they follow you back?

That was a long sentence

Seriously: freedom of speech. If you spam and litter on Twitter, you ultimately loose your followers.

Cheers,
Volker

Put the social back into social media.

Enough is enough for Twitter litter